


Banner's Moving Castle

by sciencebutch



Category: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: "hulk like fire", M/M, bookverse not movieverse though there will probably be some elements from the movie, bruce is howl, for thorbruce week, howl's moving castle au!, hulk is calcifer if you didnt guess, i based bruce off of his characterization in the indestructable hulk, thor is sophie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-06-20 04:49:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15526392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencebutch/pseuds/sciencebutch
Summary: In the land of Yggsdrasil, such things as spells, magic hammers, and rainbow bridges were everyday things. The Grandmaster of Sakaar was another matter.After fifty years of quiet, it was rumored that the Grandmaster was about to terrorize the country again. He had threatened King T'Challa's sister and had killed Wizard Stark, who had been sent to deal with her. So when a moving black castle, blowing dark smoke from its four thin turrets, appeared on the horizon, everyone thought it was the Grandmaster. The castle, however, belonged to Wizard Banner, who, it was said, likes to smash the hearts of men and women alike.





	1. In Which Thor Talks to Hammers

**Author's Note:**

> for thorbruce week  
> day one: first time  
> the first time bruce talks to thor

In the land of Yggsdrasil, where things such as magic hammers and rainbow bridges really did exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the middlest of three. Everyone knows that you will be wholly unremarkable and mediocre, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.

Thor Odinson was born the middlest of three siblings. His parents were well respected and kept a blacksmith in the prosperous town of Asgard. True, his mother died when Thor was two years old and his sister Hela was four, and his father adopted a baby named Loki. His father treated all three siblings with the same kindness and did not favor anyone in the least.

Thor’s father, Odin, was proud of his three children and sent them all to the best school in town. Thor was the most studious. He read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance he had of an interesting future. It was a disappointment to him, but he was still happy enough, hanging out with his siblings and helping Hela to seek her fortune when the time came. Since Odin was always busy in the blacksmith, Thor was the one who looked after the other two (Hela was quite irresponsible, as was Loki; Thor had taken it upon himself to be the most mature of the three). There was a certain amount of screaming and hair-pulling between the two. Loki was by no means resigned to being the one who, next to Thor, was bound to be the least successful. 

“It’s not fair!” Loki would shout. “Why should Hela have the best of it just because she was born the oldest? I shall marry a prince, so there!”

To which Hela always retorted that  _ she _ would end up disgustingly rich and powerful without having to marry anybody.

Then Thor would have to drag them apart and mend their clothes. He was very deft with his needle, but even more skillful with a hammer and an anvil. As time went on, he made weapons for his siblings too. There was one blade he made for Loki, the May Day before this story really starts, which Odin said looked as if it had come from the most expensive shop in Nidavellir. 

About this time everyone began talking of the Grandmaster of Sakaar again. It was said he had threatened the life of King T’Challa’s sister and that the King had commanded his personal magician, Tony Stark, to go into Sakaar and deal with the Grandmaster. And it seemed that Tony Stark had not only failed to deal with him: he had got himself killed by him. 

So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Asgard, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Grandmaster had moved out of Sakaar again and was about to terrorize the country the way he used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it moving actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everything was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help. 

But the castle stayed roving about the hills, and it was learned that it did not belong to the Grandmaster but to Wizard Banner, who was bad enough. Though he did not seem to want to leave the hills, he was known to amuse himself by amassing lovers and eating their hearts. Or some people said he smashed them instead. He was an utterly cold-blooded and heartless wizard and no-one was safe from him if he caught them on their own. Thor, Hela, and Loki, along with everyone else in Asgard, were warned never to go out alone, which was a great annoyance to them. They wondered what use Wizard Banner found for all the hearts he collected. 

They had other things on their minds before long, however, for Odin died suddenly just as Thor was old enough to leave school for good. It then appeared that he had been altogether too proud of his children. The school fees he had been paying had left the blacksmith with quite heavy debts. When the funeral was over, their godfather Heimdall sat down in the parlor in the house next door to the blacksmiths and explained the situation.

“You will all have to leave that school, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’ve been doing sums, and the only way I can see to keep this business going and take care of the three of you is to see you all settled in a promising apprenticeship somewhere. It isn’t practical to have you in the blacksmith. We could not afford it. So this is what I’ve decided. Hela first--”

Hela looked up apathetically, still wearing her funeral gown. At first glance, one would think that she had been crying with how red her eyes were. She hadn’t been; that was just how she did her makeup. “I want to go on learning,” she said.

“And so you shall,” said Heimdall. “I was able to contact Virginia Potts, the lady who has many connections and a lot of power. She has agreed to instruct you in the ways of regality.”

Hela merely raised an eyebrow, and Thor could see that she wasn’t quite pleased with this outcome. “Well thank you,” she said in an indecipherable tone. 

Heimdall gave her a look. She stared back. The moment was very awkward. Heimdall cleared his throat and continued:

“Now Loki, I’ve arranged for you to be apprenticed to Wizard Strange, the man who runs the Sanctum just north of here. He is an excellent magician that will teach you all you need to know of magic.”

Loki, who was just as unreadable as his sister, gave his dispassionate assent. And that was that.

Thor, listening, felt that Heimdall had worked everything out just as it should be. Loki, as the youngest, was never likely to come to as much as his sister, so Heimdall had put him where he would be able to learn magic, and maybe open his own practice. Hela, who was bound to strike out and make her her fortune, would have rich friends and riches to help her. As for Thor himself, well, he had no doubt what was coming. It did not surprise him when Heimdall said, “Now Thor, it seems only right that you inherit the blacksmith when I retire. So I’ve decided to take you on as an apprentice myself, to give you a chance to learn the trade.”

Thor wasn’t going to say that he felt resigned to this fate, so instead, he thanked Heimdall. 

“So it’s settled,” Heimdall said, relieved. 

The next day, Loki and Hela went their separate ways. Thor was not afraid to admit that he shed a tear as he saw them leave; he would miss them.

Thor started his apprenticeship later that day. He of course knew the blacksmith backwards and forwards and sideways already, having helped his father out since he was young. He was familiar with the shed where all of the tools and metals were kept, and knew how to work the bellows and light the furnace. He knew the people who worked there; most of them had been employed since he was a boy. He knew the suppliers, the people who mined the ore and brought it to the shop, and the woodcutter who restocked their firewood supply every friday. There really was not much that Heimdall could teach him, except perhaps the best way to get a customer to purchase something. 

“You need to lead up to the right equipment,” he said. “Show them the ones that won’t quite do at first, so they know the difference as soon as they see the right one.”

In fact, Thor did not work in the shop very much. After a day or so observing in the workshed, and another day going round the different types of metals with Heimdall, Heimdall set him up to chiseling the weapons. Thor sat in a small alcove at the back of the shop, adding details to armor and sharpening swords. He was quite good at it, and he liked doing it. But he did feel isolated and a little dull on occasion. The workshop people were too old to be much fun and, besides, they treated him as someone apart who was going to inherit the business someday. Thor rather envied Heimdall, who would bustle off to bargain with merchants whenever he wanted. 

The most interesting thing was the talk from the customers. It is quite hard  _ not _ to gossip when one must wait hours for repairs on their equipment to be complete, or while they purchase a battle-axe to control the bilgesnipe terrorizing their livestock. Thor sat in his alcove and hammered away at swords and heard that the Mayor was rather talented at art, and that Wizard Banner’s castle round to the cliffs again, really that man, whisper, whisper, whisper… The voices always dropped low when they talked of him, but Thor gathered that he had caught a man down the valley last month. “A monster!” declared the whispers, and then became voices again to say that Bucky Barnes was a perfect disgrace the way he did his hair. Then there would be fleeting, fearful whispers about the Grandmaster. Thor began to feel that Wizard Banner and the Grandmaster should get together.

“They seem to be made for one another. Someone should arrange a match,” he remarked to the dagger he was sharpening at that moment.

Thor talked to the equipment more and more as weeks went by. There was no one else much to talk to. Heimdall was out bargaining or advertising, and the employees were boring. Thor got into the habit of putting each weapon on a stand, or every piece of armor on a mannequin, and pausing while he told the knife or chestpiece what the person who buys it would be like. He flattered the equipment, because you should flatter customers. That is one thing he had learned from his training.

“You are agile and precise,” he told a steel dagger he had just finished sharpening. To an iron helmet he was shaping, he said, “You are bold and brash!”. He told boots they were as light as a feather, and determined that hammers were as useful around the house as they were on the battlefield. He told the metal prosthetic arm he had finished engraving a star onto, “you have a heart of gold and someone in a high position will see it and fall in love with you.” This was because he felt sorry for that arm. He wished people never had to undergo the pain of losing a limb.

Bucky Barnes came into the shop the next day and bought it. His hair was a little strange, Thor thought, peeping out of his alcove, it was far too greasy - much like Loki’s. 

Around then, everyone seemed to be buying their equipment. Maybe it was Heimdall’s sales talk, or maybe because there were rumors of a war, but the blacksmith trade was definitely picking up. Heimdall began to say, a little guiltily, “I think I should not have been in such a hurry to get Hela and Loki out of the shop. At this rate we could have managed.”

There was so much custom as April drew on toward May Day that Thor had to throw on a demure outfit and help out in the shop, too. But such was the demand that he was hard at work engraving and sharpening weapons and armor in between customers, and he stayed up late at night working. 

Later, the week before May Day, gossip reached his ears that Bucky Barnes had begun to court the mayor. 

That night, as he worked, Thor admitted to himself that his life was rather dull. Instead of talking to the equipment, he tried wielding each as he finished it and looked in the mirror. This was a mistake. He was far too self-conscious and unsure of himself that he looked weak and pitiful, rather than like a strong warrior. Sure, he did not want to marry mayors like Bucky, but he did want to do something - though he was not sure what - that had a bit more interest to it than simply chiseling chest plates. He thought that he would find time the next day to talk to Loki.

But he did not go. Either he could not find the time, or the energy, or it seemed as if it was a great distance to the Sanctum, or he remembered that on his own he was in danger from Wizard Banner - anyway, everyday it seemed more difficult to go and see his brother. It was very odd. Thor had always thought he was just as strong-minded as Hela. Now he was finding that there were some things he could only do when there were no excuses left. “This is absurd!” Thor said. “The Sanctum is only three streets away. If I run - “ and he swore to himself he would go round to Wizard Strange’s when the blacksmith was closed for May Day. 

Meanwhile a new piece of gossip came into the shop. The King had quarreled with his own cousin, Prince Erik, and the Prince had gone into exile. Nobody quite knew the reason for the fight, but the Prince had actually come through Asgard in disguise a couple months back, and nobody had known. Thor listened and felt sad. Interesting things did seem to happen, but always to somebody else. Still, it would be nice to see Loki. 

May Day came. Merrymaking filled the streets from dawn onward. Heimdall went out early, but Thor had a couple of swords to finish first. After all, Loki had work to do, too. He didn’t want to inconvenience him by showing up too early. He watched people crowding past the window in all kinds of bright clothes, people selling souvenirs, people walking on stilts, and felt really excited. 

But when he at last put on a gray sweater over his black-and-white monochrome outfit, Thor did not feel excited. He felt overwhelmed. There were too many people rushing past, laughing and shouting, far too much noise and jostling. Thor felt as if the months of sitting and hammering and chiseling had turned him into an old man. He crept along close to the houses, trying to avoid being trodden on by people’s best shoes or being jabbed by elbows in trailing silk sleeves. When there came a sudden volley of bangs from overhead somewhere, Thor thought he was going to faint. He looked up and saw Wizard Banner’s castle right down on the chimneys. Green flames were shooting out of all four of the castle’s turrets, bringing balls of green fire with them that exploded high in the sky, quite horrendously. Wizard Banner seemed to be offended by May Day, or maybe he was trying to join in, in his own fashion. Thor was too terrified to care. He would have gone home, except he was halfway to the Sanctum by then. So he ran. 

“What made me think I wanted life to be interesting?” he asked himself as he ran. “I’d be far too scared. It comes of being the middle sibling of three.”

When he reached Market Square, it was worse, if possible. Most of the inns were in the Square. Crowds of young men swaggered drunkenly to and fro, trailing cloaks and long sleeves and stamping buckled boots they would never have dreamed of wearing on a working day, calling loud remarks and flirting with other men and women. It was perfectly normal for May Day, but Thor was afraid of that as well. And when a young man in a fantastical purple shirt spotted Thor and decided to flirt with him as well, Thor shrank into a shop doorway and tried to hide. 

The young man looked at him in surprise. “It’s all right,” he smiled, though Thor thought it looked rather pitying, “I only want to buy you a drink.” 

The sorry look made Thor utterly ashamed. The man was quite dashing, as well, with a square jaw, and curly brown hair. The first two buttons of his shirt were undone, and his brown pants clung tightly to his hips. There was a pair of thin-rimmed glasses in his front pocket. 

“Oh no thank you,” Thor stammered. “I am on my way to see my brother.”

“Then by all means do so,” laughed the man. “Who am I to keep a handsome man from his brother? Would you like me to accompany you, since the streets are so busy, and you seem so scared?”

He meant it kindly, which made Thor more ashamed than ever. “No. No thank you,” he gasped and fled away past him. 

He made it to the Sanctum and knocked furiously, wanting to go inside more than anything. A stout man with a serious demeanor opened the door.

“I am looking for my brother, Loki.” Thor told him. The man merely nodded and gestured for him to come in. 

“Loki!” He shouted, “your brother is here!”

“Thank you, Wong.” Loki replied. He was barely in the doorway before Thor ran up to him and hugged him. Loki gave him an awkward greeting from inside his embrace, and ushered him into the parlor. 

“Sit down.” he said. He poured him some tea. Thor blanched; he was not a fan of tea. “You may need this,” Loki continued. 

Thor sank into an armchair, feeling a little tearful. “Oh, Loki!” he said, “I am so glad to see you!”

“Yes, and I’m glad you’re sitting down,” said Loki. “You see, I’m not Loki. I’m Hela.”


	2. In which Thor is compelled to seek his fortune

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor is visited in the shop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i havent been posting much for thorbruce week - hopefully this will be ok :) i might post another chapter tonight also, who knows!

_“What?”_ Thor stared at the man on the plush armchair opposite her. He _looked_ just like Loki. He had Loki’s trademark look: greasy dark hair that was less from a lack of hygiene and more from an excess (Thor still thinks that his extreme use of hair products was the cause for their debt, but he had not been able to prove it), and his bright blue eyes.

“I am Hela,” said his brother – sister? “Who did you catch cutting up Loki’s expensive green suit? _I_ never told Loki that. Did you?”

“No,” said Thor, quite stunned. He could see it was Hela now. There was Hela’s off-putting head tilt to Loki’s, and her way of speaking, which entailed her voice lilting on random syllables. “Why?”

“I have been dreading you coming to see me,” Hela said, “because I knew I would have to tell you. It _is_ a relief now that I have. Don’t you dare tell anyone.”

“I won’t,” Thor said quickly, “But why? How?”

“Loki and I arranged it,” Hela said, staring very intently at Thor in a way that made him rather nervous, “because I want to learn witchcraft and Loki did not.”

“Oh,” he said simply. “Why didn’t you just tell Heimdall? I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded.”

“Why, brother,” Hela lilted, “where would be the fun in that?”

“I don’t know why that constitutes fun for the two of you,” Thor began, “but –“

“Loki,” he was cut off by Wong telling Hela that her afternoon training was about to begin. She stood up and began walking Thor to the door.

“On May Day?” Thor questioned. Hela merely waved her hand absentmindedly.

“I can’t be bothered to care about such petty celebrations.” And that was that.

The door of the Sanctum shut on his face as he was waving goodbye. Thor walked home, deep in thought. Interesting things did seem to happen, just not to him. He didn’t think he’d be able to handle it, if something of the sort did occur, anyway. Still…he couldn’t help but think.

There were fireworks now, going up from the field by the river where the Fair was, competing with the green bangs from Banner’s castle. Thor ran the rest of the way home, the loud noises setting his heart racing.

He thought and thought, most of the following week, and all that happened was that he became confused and discontented. Thor was resigned to his fate of working in a blacksmith – he was the middle child, after all, he really didn’t have a choice – engraving hammers and molding metal boots, becoming more and more introverted as the years went by…but there was something deep within him, something that longed for adventure. Something – _anything_ – that would be thrilling and exciting. He was amazed at Hela and Loki; they had simply gone after what they wanted, and they made it look so _easy_ , as well.

There was a lot of time for thinking. Without Heimdall, Thor was mostly alone in the shop. Heimdall did seem to be out a lot, and trade was slack after May Day.

               Thor was working on sharpening a sword when a new thought struck him. “Does it matter if there are no weapons to sell?” he asked the weapon. He looked around at the mannequins in various suits of armor. “What good are you all?” he asked them. “You certainly aren’t doing me a scrap of good.”

               And he was within an ace of leaving the blacksmith and setting out to seek his fortune, until he remembered he was the middle child and there was no point. He took up the sword again, sighing.

               He was still discontented, alone in the shop next morning, when the sound of wheels and horse hoofs could be heard, and a carriage darkened the window. The shop bell clanged and the _grandest_ customer he had ever seen sailed in. He wore elegant robes twinkling with diamonds. Thor’s eyes went to the man’s face first, where a metallic blue stripe had been painted, trailing down to his chin from his bottom lip. He looked old and regal. Thor’s eyes took in the person who followed the man in, a slightly formless-faced bald man, quite well dressed, but pale and obviously upset. He stared at Thor with a kind of beseeching horror. He was clearly younger than the man he had walked in with – though not by much, it seemed.

               “Mister Odinson?” the man asked in a musical but commanding voice.

               “Yes,” said Thor. The servant – for that is what the bald man must’ve been – looked more upset than ever.

               “I hear that you sell the most wonderful weapons,” said the man. “Why don’t you show me?”

               Thor did not trust himself to answer in his present mood – discontented and disgruntled – but he ushered the man over to the weapon racks.

               The man began rejecting the equipment instantly; he turned down three daggers, five battleaxes, and seven swords, before he commented:

               “These are all such tacky items. They don’t really do anything for anybody, do they? You are wasting my precious, precious time, Mister Odinson.”

               Thor found himself quite annoyed. “Only because you came in and asked for weapons. This is only a small blacksmith in a small town, Sir. Why did you –“ Behind the man, the servant gasped and seemed to be trying to signal warningly. “- bother to come in?” Thor finished, wondering what was going on.

               “I always bother when someone tries to set themselves up against the Grandmaster, dear,” said the man. “I’ve heard of you, Mister Odinson, and I don’t really care for your competition or your attitude. So I came to put a stop to you. There.” He spread out her hand in a flinging motion towards Thor’s face.

               “You mean you’re the Grandmaster?” Thor quavered. His voice seemed to have gone strange with fear and astonishment.

               “Yes, I am,” said the man. He looked slightly bashful for a moment, before he continued, “and let that teach you to meddle with things that belong to me.”

               “I don’t think I did. There must be some mistake,” Thor croaked. The servant was now staring at him in utter horror, though he could not see why.

               The Grandmaster hummed. “No mistake, Mister Odinson,” he said. “Come, Skurge.” He turned and swept to the shop door. While the servant was humbly opening it for him, he turned back to Thor. “By the way, you won’t be able to tell anyone you’re under a spell,” he said. The shop door tolled like a funeral bell as he left. “Ta ta,” the Grandmaster said as the door shut behind him.

               Thor put his hands to his face, wondering what the servant had stared at. He felt soft, leathery wrinkles. He looked at his hands. They were wrinkled too, and skinny, with large veins in the back and knuckles like knobs. He pulled his gray pantleg up against his leg and looked down at skinny, decrepit ankles and feet which had made his shoes all knobby. They were the legs of someone about ninety and they seemed to be real.

               Thor rushed himself to a mirror, and found he had to hobble. The face in the mirror was quite calm, because it was what he expected to see. It was the face of a gaunt old man, withered and brownish, with cropped wispy white hair. His own eyes, yellow and watery, stared out at him, looking rather tragic.

               “Don’t worry, old thing,” Thor said to the face. “You are quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are.”

               He thought about his situation, quite calmly. Everything seemed to have gone calm and remote. He was not even particularly angry with the Grandmaster.

               “Well, of course I shall have to do for him when I get the chance,” he told himself, “but meanwhile, if Hela and Loki can stand being one another, I can stand being like this.  But I can’t stay here. Heimdall will have a fit. Let’s see. This outfit is quite suitable, but I shall need my sweater and some food.”

               He hobbled over to the shop door and carefully put up the **CLOSED** notice. His joints creaked as he moved. He had to walk bowed and slow. But he was relieving to discover that he was quite a hale old man. He did not feel weak or ill, just stiff. He hobbled to collect his sweater and put it on. The he shuffled through into the house, where he collected his coin purse and a parcel of bread and cheese. He let himself out of the house, carefully hiding the key in the usual places, and hobbled away down the street, surprised at how calm he still felt.

               He did wonder if he should say goodbye to Hela. But he did not like the idea of Hela not knowing him. It was best just to go. Thor decided he would write to both his siblings when he got wherever he was going, and shuffled on, through the field where the Fair had been, over the bridge, and on into the country lanes beyond. It was a warm spring day. Thor discovered that being an old man did not stop him enjoying the sight and smell of May in the hedgerows, though the sight was a little blurred. His back began to ache. He hobbled sturdily enough, but he needed a stick. He searched the hedges as he went for a loose stake of some kind.

               Evidently his eyes were not as good as they had been. He thought he saw a stick, a mile or so on, but when he hauled on it, it proved to be the bottom end of an old scarecrow someone had thrown into the hedge. Thor hauled the thing upright. It was gold and red, with an old turnip for a head. The vegetable had a mask drilled into it, making it look as if it had a face. Thor found he had some fellow feeling for it. Instead of pulling it to pieces and taking the stick, he stuck it between two branches of the hedge, so that it stood looming rakishly above the may, with the tattered red sleeves on its stick arms fluttering over the hedge.

               “There,’ he said, and his cracked old voice surprised him into giving a cracked old cackle of laughter. “Neither of us are up to much, are we, my friend? Maybe you’ll get back to your field if I leave you where people can see you.” He set off up the lane again, but a thought struck him, and he turned back. “Now if I wasn’t so doomed to failure because of my position in the family,” he told the scarecrow, “you could come to life and offer me help in making my fortune. But I wish you luck anyway.”

               He cackled again as he walked on. Perhaps he was a little mad, but then old men often were.

               He found a stick an hour or so later when he sat down on the back to rest and eat his bread and cheese. There were noises in the hedge behind him: little strangled squeaks, followed by heavings that shook may petals off the hedge. Thor crawled on his bony knees to peer past leaves and flowers and thorns into the inside of the hedge and discovered a thin gray dog in there. It was hopelessly trapped by a stout stick which had somehow got twisted into a robe that was tied round its neck. The stick had wedged itself between two branches of the hedge so that the dog could barely move. It rolled its eyes wildly at Thor’s peering face.

               Thor was never one to be afraid of dogs. He was rather fond of them, actually. But he will admit, he was quite alarmed by the two rows of white fangs in the creatures open jaws. But he said to himself, “The way I am now, it’s scarcely worth worrying about,” and felt in his pocket for his knife. He reached into the hedge with the knife and sawed away at the rope round the dog’s neck.

               The dog was very wild. It flinched away from him and growled. But Thor sawed bravely on. “You’ll starve or throttle to death, my friend,” he told the dog in his cracked old voice, “unless you let me cut you loose. In fact, I think someone has tried to throttle you already. Maybe that accounts for your wildness.” The rope had been tied quite tightly round the dog’s neck and the stick had been twisted viciously into it. It took a lot of sawing before the rope parted and the dog was able to drag itself out from under the stick.

               “Would you like some bread and cheese?” Thor asked it then. But the dog just growled at him, forced its way out through the opposite side of the hedge, and slunk away. “There’s gratitude for you!” Thor said, rubbing his prickled arms. “But you left me a gift in spite of yourself.” He pulled the stick that had trapped the dog out of the hedge and found it was a proper walking stick, well-trimmed and tipped with iron. Thor finished his bread and cheese and set off walking again. The lane became steeper and steeper and he found the stick a great help. It was something to talk to. Thor thumped along with a will, chatting to his stick. After all, old people often talk to themselves.

               “There’s two encounters,” he said, “and not a scrap of magical gratitude from either. Still, you’re a good stick. I’m not grumbling. But I’m surely due to have a third encounter, magical or not. In fact, I insist on one. I wonder what it will be.”

               The third encounter came toward the end of the afternoon when Thor had worked his way quite high into the hills. A countryman came whistling down the lane toward her. A shepherd, Thor thought, going home after seeing to his sheep. He was a well-set-up young fellow of forty or so. “Gracious!” Thor said to himself. “This morning I would have seen him as an old man. How one’s point of view does alter!”

               When the shepherd saw Thor mumbling to himself, he moved rather carefully over to the other side of the lane and called out with great heartiness, “Good evening to you, Father! Where are you off to?”

               “Father?” said Thor. “I am not your father, young man!”

               “A manner of speaking,” the shepherd said, edging along against the opposite hedge. “I was only meaning a polite inquiry, seeing you walking into the hills at the end of the day. You won’t get down into Tower Hills before nightfall, will you?”

               Thor had not considered this. He stood in the road and thought about it. “It doesn’t matter really,” he said, half to himself. “You can’t be fussy when you’re off to seek your fortune.”

               “Can’t you indeed, Father?” said the shepherd. He had now edged himself downhill of Thor and seemed to feel better for it. “Then I wish you good luck, provided your fortune don’t have nothing to do with charming folk’s cattle.” And he took off down the road in great strides, almost running, but not quite.

               Thor stared after him indignantly. “He thought I was a wizard!” he said to his stick. He had half a mind to scare the shepherd by shouting nasty things after him, but that seemed a little unkind. He plugged on uphill, mumbling. Shortly, the hedges gave way to bare banks and the land beyond became heathery upland, with a lot of steepness beyond that was covered with yellow, rattling grass. Thor kept grimly on. By now his knobby old feet ached, and his back, and his knees. He became too tired to mumble and simply plugged on, panting, until the sun was quite low. And all at once it became quite clear to Thor that he could not walk a step further. He collapsed onto a stone by the wayside, wondering what he would do now. “The only fortune I can think of is a comfortable chair!” he gasped.

               The stone proved to be on a sort of headland, which gave Thor a magnificent view of the way he had come. There was most of the valley spread out beneath him in the setting sun, all fields and walls and hedges, the windings of the river, and the fine mansions of rich people glowing out from clumps of trees, right down to blue mountains in the far distance. Just below him was Asgard. Thor could look down into its well-known streets. There was Market Square and the Sanctum. He could have tossed a stone down the chimney pots of the house next to the blacksmith.

               “How near it still is!” Thor told his stick in dismay. “All that walking just to get above my own rooftop!”

               It got cold on the stone as the sun went down. An unpleasant wind blew whichever way Thor turned to avoid it. Now it no longer seemed so unimportant that he would be out on the hills during the night. He found himself thinking more and more of a comfortable chair and a fireside, and also of darkness and wild animals. But if he went back to Asgard, it would be the middle of the night before he got there. He might just as well go on. He sighed and stood up, creaking. It was awful. He ached all over.

               “I never realized before what old people had to put up with!” he panted as he labored uphill. “Still, I don’t think wolves will eat me. I must be far too dry and tough. That’s one comfort.”

               Night was coming down fast now and the heathery uplands were blue-gray. The wind was sharper. Thor’s panting and the creaking of his limbs were so loud in his ears that it took a while to notice that some of the grinding and puffing was not coming from himself at all. He looked up blurrily.

               Wizard Banner’s castle was rumbling and bumping toward him across the moorland. Black smoke was blowing up in clouds from behind its black battlements. It looked tall and thin and heavy and ugly and very sinister indeed. Thor leaned on his stick and watched it. He was not particularly frightened. He wondered how it moved. But the main thing in his mind was that all that smoke must mean a large fireside somewhere inside those tall black walls.

               “Well, why not?” he said to his stick. “Wizard Banner is not likely to want _my_ heart for his collection; he only takes them from pretty people.”

               He raised his stick and waved it imperiously at the castle.

               “ _Stop!_ ” he shrieked.

               The castle obediently came to a rumbling, grinding halt about fifty feet uphill from him. Thor felt rather gratified as he hobbled toward it.


	3. In which Thor enters a castle and a bargain

               There was a large black door in the black wall facing Thor and he made for that, hobbling briskly. The castle was uglier than ever close to. It was far too tall for its height and not a very regular shape. As far as Thor could see in the growing darkness, it was built of huge black blocks, like coal, and, like coal, the blocks were all different shapes and sizes. Chill breathed off these blocks as he got closer, but that failed to frighten Thor at all. He just thought of chairs and firesides and stretched his hand out eagerly to the door. His hand could not come near it. Some invisible wall stopped his hand about a foot from the door. Thor prodded at it with an irritable finger. When that made no difference, he prodded with his stick. The wall seemed to be all over the door from as high as his stick could reach, and right down to the heather sticking out from under the doorstep.

               “Open up!” Thor cackled at it.

               That made no difference to the wall.

               “Very well,” Thor said. “I’ll find your back door.” He hobbled off to the left-hand corner of the castle, that being both nearest and slightly downhill. But he could not get round the corner. The invisible wall stopped him again as soon as he was level with the irregular black cornerstones. At this, Thor cursed. He stumped uphill and anti-clockwise to the castle’s right-hand corner. There was no barrier there. He turned that corner and hobbled eagerly toward the second big black door in the middle of that side of the castle.

               There was a barrier over that door too.

               Thor glowered at it. “I call that very unwelcoming!” he said.

               Black smoke blew down from the battlements in clouds. Thor coughed. Now he was angry. He was old, frail, chilly, and aching all over. Night was coming on and the castle just sat and blew smoke at him. “I’ll speak to Banner about this!” he said and set off fiercely to the next corner. There was no barrier there – evidently you had to go around the castle anti-clockwise – but there, a bit sideways in the next wall, was a third door. This one was much smaller and shabbier.

               “The back door at last!” Thor said.

               The castle started to move again as Thor got near the back door. The ground shook. The walls shuddered and creaked, and the door started to travel away sideways from him.

               “Oh, no you don’t!” Thor shouted. He ran after the door and hit it violently with his stick. “Open up!” he yelled.

               The door sprang open inward, still moving away sideways. Thor, by hobbling furiously, managed to get one foot up on its doorstep. Then he hopped and scrambled and hopped again, while the great black blocks round the door jolted and crunched as the castle gathered speed over the uneven hillside. Thor did not wonder the castle had a lopsided look. The marvel was that it did not fall apart on the spot.

               “What a stupid way to treat a building!” He panted as he threw himself inside it. He had to drop his stick and hang on to the open door in order not to be jolted straight out again.

               When he began to get his breath, he realized there was a person standing in front of him, holding the door too. He would have been a head shorter than Thor had he been able to stand up straight, but now it was the other way around. He could see that he was the merest child, only a little older than Loki. And he seemed to be trying to shut the door on him and push him out of the warm, lamplit, low-beamed room beyond him, into the night again.

               “Don’t you have the impudence to shut the door on me, my boy!” Thor said.

               “I wasn’t going to, mister, but you’re keeping the door open,” he protested. “What do you want, sir?”

               Thor looked round at what he could see beyond the boy. There were a number of probably wizardly things hanging from the beams – strings of onions, bunches of herbs, and bundles of strange roots. There were also definitely wizardly things, like large tomes, crooked bottles and flasks, and an old, brown, grinning human skull. On the other side of the boy was a fireplace with a small fire burning in the grate. It was a much smaller fire than all the smoke outside suggested, but then this was obviously only a back room of the castle. Much more important to Thor, this fire had reached the glowing rosy stage, with small flames dancing on the logs, and placed beside it in the warmest position was a low chair with a cushion on it.

               Thor pushed the boy aside and dived for that chair. “Ah! My fortune!” he said, settling himself comfortably on it. It was bliss. The fire warmed his aches and the chair supported his back and he knew that if anyone wanted to turn him out now, they were going to have to use extreme and violent magic to do it.

               The boy shut the door. Then he picked up Thor’s stick and politely leaned it against the chair for him. Thor realized that there was now no sign at all that the castle was moving across the hillside: not even the ghost of a rumble or the tiniest shaking. How odd! “Tell wizard Banner,” he said to the boy, “that this castle’s going to come apart round his ears if it travels much further.”

               “The castle’s bespelled to hold together, sir,” the boy said. “But I’m afraid Mr. Banner not here just at the moment.”

               This was good news to Thor. “When will he be back?” he asked a little nervously.

               “Probably not till tomorrow now, sir,” the boy said. “What do you want? Can I help you instead? I’m Mr. Banner’s apprentice, Peter.”

               This was better news than ever. “I’m afraid only the Wizard can possibly help me,” Thor said quickly and firmly. It was probably true too. “I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.” It was clear Peter _did_ mind. He hovered over him a little helplessly. To make it plain to him that he had no intention of being turned out by a mere boy apprentice, Thor closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep.

               “Tell him the name’s Thor,” he murmured. “ _Old_ Thor,” he added, to be on the safe side.

               “That will probably mean waiting all night,” Peter said. Since this was exactly what Thor wanted, he pretended not to hear. In fact, he almost certainly fell into a swift doze. He was so tired from all that walking. After a moment Peter gave him up and went back to the work he was doing at the workbench where the lamp stood.

               So, he would have a whole night’s shelter, even if it was on slightly false pretenses, Thor thought drowsily. Since Banner was such a wicked man, it probably served him right to be imposed upon. But he intended to be well away from here by the time Banner came back and raised objections. He looked sleepily and slyly across at the apprentice. It rather surprised him to find him such a nice, polite boy. After all, he had forced his way in quite rudely and Peter had not complained at all. Perhaps Banner kept him in abject servility. But Peter did not look servile. He was a tall, lanky boy with a pleasant, open sort of face, and he was most respectably dressed. In fact, if Thor had not seen him at that moment carefully pouring green fluid out of a crooked flask onto black powder in a bent glass jar, he would have taken him for the son of a prosperous farmer. How odd!

               Still, things were bound to be odd where wizards were concerned, Thor thought. And this kitchen, or workshop, was beautifully cozy and very peaceful. Thor went properly to sleep and snored. He did not wake up when there came a flash and a muted bang from the workbench, followed by a hurriedly bitten-off swear word from Peter. He did not wake when Peter, sucking his burned fingers, put the spell aside for the night and fetched bread and cheese out of the closet. He did not stir when Peter knocked his stick down with a clatter, reaching over him for a log to put on the fire, or when Peter, looking down into Thor’s open mouth, remarked to the fireplace, “He’s got all his teeth. He’s not the Grandmaster, is he?”

               “No. Not let him in if he was,” the fireplace retorted.

               Peter shrugged and picked Thor’s stick politely up again. Then he put a log on the fire with equal politeness and went away to bed somewhere overhead.

               In the middle of the night Thor was woken by someone snoring. He jumped upright, rather irritated to discover that he was the one who had been snoring. It seemed to him that he had only dropped off for a second or so, but Peter seemed to have vanished in those seconds, taking the light with him. No doubt a wizard’s apprentice learned to do that kind of thing in his first week. And he had left the fire very low. It was giving out irritating hissings and poppings. A cold draft blew on Thor’s back. Thor recalled that he was in a wizard’s castle, and also, with unpleasant distinctness, that there was a human skull on a workbench somewhere behind him.

               He shivered and cranked his stiff old neck around, but there was only darkness behind him. “Let’s have a bit more light, shall we?” he said. His cracked little voice seemed to make no more noise than the crackling of the fire. Thor was surprised. He had expected it to echo through the vaults of the castle. Still, there was a basket of logs beside him. He stretched out a creaking arm and heaved a long on the fire, which sent a spray of green sparks flying up the chimney. He heaved on a second log and sat back, not without a nervous look or so behind him, where green light from the fire was dancing over the polished brown bone of the skull. The room was quite small. There was no one in it but Thor and the skull.

               “He’s got both feet in the grave and I’ve only got one,” he consoled himself. He turned back to the fire, which was now flaring up into deep green flames. “Must be salt in this wood,” Thor murmured. He settled himself more comfortably, putting his knobby feet on the fender and his head into a corner of the chair, where he could stare into the colored flames, and began dreamily considering what he ought to do in the morning. But he was sidetracked a little by imagining a face in the flames. “It would be a wide green face,” he murmured, “very long and wide, with a thick blue nose. But those curly plumes of smoke on top are most definitely your hair. Suppose I didn’t go until Banner gets back? Wizards can lift spells, I suppose. And those purple flames near the bottom make the mouth – you have savage teeth, my friend. You have too black tufts of flame for eyebrows…” Curiously enough, the only orange flames in the fire were under the black eyebrow flames, just like eyes, and they each had a little purple glint in the middle that Thor could almost imagine was looking at him, like the pupil of an eye. “On the other hand,” Thor continued, looking into the green flames, “if the spell was off, I’d have my heart smashed before I could turn around.”

               “You don’t want heart smashed?” asked the fire.

               It was definitely the fire that spoke. Thor saw its purple mouth move as the words came. Its voice was nearly as cracked as his own, full of the spitting and whining of burning wood. “Naturally I don’t,” Thor answered. “What are you?”

               “Fire demon,” answered the purple mouth. There was more whine than spit to its voice as it said, “Bound to hearth by contract. Can’t move from this spot.” Then its voice became brisk and crackling. “What are _you_?” it asked. “Hulk see man is under spell.” That’s what the fire’s name must’ve been: Hulk.

               This roused Thor from his dreamlike state. “You see!” he exclaimed. “Can you take the spell off?”

               There was a popping, blazing silence while the orange eyes in the demon’s wavering green face traveled up and down Thor. “Feels like spell from Grandmaster.”

               “It is,” said Thor.

               “More than that, though,” crackled the demon. “Hulk feel two layers. And you can’t say you under spell.” It gazed at Thor a moment longer. “Hulk need to study it,” it said.

               “How long will that take?” Thor asked.

               “Could be a while,” said the demon. And it added with a soft flicker, “How about you make bargain with me? Hulk break spell if you break contract Hulk under.”

               Thor looked warily at the demon’s wide green face. It had a look that was distinctly cunning as it made this proposal. Everything he had read showed the extreme danger of making a bargain with a demon. And there was no doubt that this one did look extraordinarily evil. Those long purple teeth. “Are you sure you’re being quite honest?” he said.

               “No,” admitted the demon. “But you don’t want to stay like that. Spell shortened life by sixty years.”

               This was a nasty thought and one which Thor had tried not to think about up to now. It made quite a difference. “This contract you’re under,” he said. “It’s with Wizard Banner, is it?”

               “Yes,” said the demon. Its voice took on a bit of a whine again. “Hulk stuck to hearth and can’t move. Forced to do stuff. Hulk moves the castle, and other stuff Banner wants. Banner heartless.”

               Thor did not need telling that Banner was heartless. On the other hand, the demon was probably quite as wicked. “Don’t you get anything out of this contract at all?” he said.

               “Hulk not stupid. Wouldn’t have done it if Hulk got nothing,” said the demon, flickering sadly. “But Hulk doesn’t like it. Hulk being exploited.”

               Thor felt a great deal of sympathy for the demon, in spite of his caution. “All right,” he said. “What are the terms of the contract? How do I break it?”

               An eager purple grin spread across the demon’s green face. “You agree to bargain?”

               “If you agree to break the spell on me,” Thor said, with a brave sense of saying something fatal.

               “Done!” cried the demon, his long face leaping gleefully up the chimney. “Hulk break spell when you break contract!”

               “Then tell me how I break your contract,” Thor said.

               The orange eyes glinted at him and looked away. “Hulk can’t. Part of contract is neither Hulk nor Banner can say what the main clause is.”

               Thor saw that he had been tricked. He opened his mouth to tell the demon that it could sit in the fireplace until Doomsday in that case.

               The demon realized he was going to. “Hey!” it crackled. “You can find out if watch and listen carefully. Try. Contract doing no good in long run.”

               It was in earnest, leaping about on its logs in an agitated way. Thor again felt a great deal of sympathy. “But if I am to watch and listen, that means I have to stay here in Banner’s castle,” he objected.

               “Only for month. Hulk must study spell too,” the demon pleaded.

               “But what possible excuse can I give for doing that?” Thor asked.

               “We think of one. Banner pretty useless at most things,” Thor doubted that, but didn’t interrupt, “We can trick him.”

               “Very well,” Thor said. “I’ll stay. Now find an excuse.”

               He settled himself comfortably in the chair while the demon thought. It thought aloud, in a little crackling, flickering murmur, which reminded Thor rather of the way he had talked to his stick when he walked here, and it blazed while it thought which such a glad and powerful roaring that he dozed again. He thought the demon did make a few suggestions. He remembered shaking his head to the notion that he should pretend to be Banner’s long-lost great-aunt, and to one or two other ones even more far-fetched, but he did not remember very clearly. The demon at length fell to singing a gentle, flickering little song. It was not in any language Thor knew – or he thought not, until he distinctly heard the word “saucepan” in it several times – and it was very sleepy-sounding. Thor fell into a deep sleep, which a slight suspicion that he was being bewitched now, as well as beguiled, but it did not bother him particularly. He would be free of the spell soon…

 


	4. In which Thor discovers several strange things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce is (re?) introduced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> does the hulk as calcifer count as fire for thorbruce week?  
> if not too bad

               When Thor woke up, daylight was streaming across him. Since Thor remembered no windows at all in the castle, his first notion was that he had fallen asleep engraving chest-plates and simply dreamed of leaving home. The fire in front of her had sunk to rosy charcoal and white ash, which convinced him that he had certainly dreamed there was a fire demon. But his very first movements told him that there were some things he had not dreamed. There were sharp cracks from all over his body.

               “Ow!” he exclaimed. “I ache all over!” the voice that exclaimed was a weak, cracked piping. He put his knobby hands to his face and felt wrinkles. At that, he discovered that he had been in a state of shock all yesterday. He was very angry indeed with the Grandmaster for doing this to him, hugely, enormously angry. “Sailing into shops and turning people old!” he exclaimed. “Oh _what_ I won’t do to him!”

               His anger made him jump up in a salvo of cracks and creaks and hobble over to the unexpected window. It was above the workbench. To his utter astonishment, the view from it was a view of a dockside town. He could see a sloping, unpaved street, lined with small, rather poor-looking houses, and masts sticking up beyond the roofs. Beyond the masts, he caught a glimmer of the sea, which was something he had never seen in his life before.

               “Where am I?” Thor asked the skull standing on the bench. “I don’t expect you to answer that, my friend,” he added hastily, remembering this was a wizard’s castle, and he turned round to take a look at the room.

               It was quite a small room, with heavy black beams in the ceiling. By daylight, it was amazingly dirty. The stones of the floor were stained and greasy, ash was piled within the fender, and cobwebs hung in dusty droops from the beams. There was a layer of dust on the skull. Thor absently wiped it off as he went to peer into the sink beside the workbench. He shuddered at the pink-and-gray slime in it and the white slime dripping from the pump above it. Banner obviously did not care what squalor his servants lived in.

               The rest of the castle had to be beyond one or other of the four low black doors around the room. Thor opened the nearest, in the end wall beyond the bench. There was a large bathroom beyond it. In some ways it was a bathroom you might normally find only in a palace, full of luxuries such as an indoor toilet, a shower stall, an immense bath with clawed feet, and mirrors on every wall. But it was even dirtier than the other room. Thor winced from the toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled from a green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at his shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large shelf over the bath. They were in jars, boxes, tubes, and hundreds of tattered brown packets and paper bags. The biggest jar had a name. It was called **DRYING POWER** in crooked letters. Thor was not sure whether there should be a **D** in “power” or not. He picked up a packet at random. It had **SKIN** scrawled on it, and he put it back hurriedly. Another jar said **HAIR** in the same scrawl. A tube stated **FOR DECAY**.

               “It seems to work too,” Thor murmured, looking into the washbasin with a shiver. Water ran into the basin when he turned a blue-green knob that might have been brass and washed some of the decay away. Thor rinsed his hands and face in the water without touching the basin, but he did not have the courage to use **DRYING POWER**. He dried the water on his pants and then set off to the next black door.

               That one opened onto a flight of rickety wooden stairs. Thor heard someone move up there and shut the door hurriedly. It seemed only to lead to a sort of loft anyway. He hobbled to the next door. By now he was moving quite easily. He was a hale old man, as he had discovered yesterday.

               The third door opened onto a poky backyard with high brick walls. It contained a big stack of logs, and heaps of what seemed to be scrap iron, wheels, buckets, metal sheeting, wire, mounded almost to the tops of the walls. Thor shut that door too, rather puzzled, because it did not seem to match the castle at all. There was no castle to be seen above the brick walls. They ended at the sky. Thor could think that this part was around the side where the invisible wall had stopped him the night before.

               He opened the fourth door and it was just a broom cupboard, with two fine but dusty velvet cloaks hanging on the brooms. Thor shut it again, slowly. The only other door was in the wall with the window, and that was the door he had come in by last night. He hobbled over and cautiously opened that.

               He stood for a moment looking out at a slowly moving view of the hills, watching heather slide past underneath the door, feeling the wind blow through his hair, and listening to the rumble and grind of the big black stones as the castle moved. Then he shut the door and went to the window. And there was the seaport town again. It was no picture. A woman had opened a door opposite and was sweeping dust into the street. Behind that house a grayish canvas sail was going up a mast in brisk jerks, disturbing a flock of seagulls into flying round and round against the glimmering sea.

               “I don’t understand,’ Thor told the human skull. Then, because the fire looked almost out, he went and put on a couple of logs and raked away some of the ash.

               Green flames climbed between the logs, small and curly, and shot up into a long face with black wisps of smoke for hair. “Morning,” said the fire demon. “Don’t forget bargain.”

               So, none of it was a dream. Thor was not much given to crying, but he sat in the chair for quite a while staring at a blurred and sliding fire demon and did not pay much attention to the sounds of Peter getting up until he found him standing beside him, looking embarrassed and a little exasperated.

               “You’re still here,” he said. “Is something the matter, sir?”

               Thor sniffed. “I’m old,” he began.

               But it was just as the witch had said. He couldn’t tell anyone about the spell. Peter smiled cheerfully, “Well it comes to us all in time, mister. Would you like some breakfast?”

               Thor discovered he was a very hale old man indeed. After only bread and cheese at lunchtime yesterday, he was ravenous. “Yes!” he said, and when Peter went to the closet in the wall, he sprang up and peered over his shoulders to see what there was to eat.

               “I’m afraid there’s only bread and cheese,” Peter said rather stiffly.

               “But there’s a whole basket of eggs in there!” Thor said. “And isn’t that bacon? What about a hot drink as well? Where’s your kettle?”

               “There isn’t one,” Peter said. “Mister Banner is the only one who can cook.”

               “I can cook,” said Thor. “Unhook that frying pan and I’ll show you.”

               He reached for the large black pan hanging on the closet wall, in spite of Peter trying to prevent him. “You don’t understand,” Peter said. “It’s Hulk, the fire demon. He won’t bend down his head to be cooked on but anyone but Mister Banner.”

               Thor turned and looked at the fire demon. He flickered back at him wickedly. “Hulk hate being exploited,” he said.

               “You mean,” Thor said to Peter, “that you have to do without even a hot drink unless Banner’s here?” Peter gave an embarrassed nod. “Then _you’re_ the one who’s being exploited!” Said Thor. “Give that here.”  He wrenched the pan from Peter’s resisting fingers, plonked the bacon into it, popped a handy wooden spoon into the egg basket, and marched with the lot to the fireplace. “Now, Hulk,” he said, “let’s have no more nonsense. Bend down your head.”

               “Can’t make Hulk do anything!” crackled the fire demon.

               “Oh, yes I can!” Thor crackled back, with the ferocity that had often stopped both his siblings in mid-fight. “If you don’t I shall pour water on you. Or I shall pick up the tongs and take away both your logs,“ he added, as he got himself creakingly onto his knees by the hearth. There he whispered, “Or I can go back on our bargain, or tell Banner about it, can’t I?”

               “Hulk hate old man,” Hulk spat. “Why did Peter let you in?” sulkily he bent his green face forward until all that could be seen of him was a ring of curly black plumes of smoke dancing on the logs.

               “Thank you,” Thor said, and slapped the heavy pan onto the black ring to make sure Hulk did not suddenly rise up again.

               “Hulk hopes your bacon burns,” Hulk said, muffled under the pan.

               Thor slapped slices of bacon into the pan. It was good and hot. The bacon sizzled, and he had to wrap his sweater around his hand to hold the handle. The door opened, but he did not notice because of the sizzling. “Don’t be silly,” he told Hulk. “And hold still because I want to break in the eggs.”

               “Oh, hello, Mr. Banner,” Peter said helplessly.

               “I’ve told you, Peter, it’s _Doctor_ Banner.”

               Thor turned around at that, rather hurriedly. He stared. The fellow in a purple button-up who had just come in stopped in the act of leaning a guitar in the corner. He stared at Thor with curious bright green eyes. His square, angular face was perplexed.

               “Who on earth are you?” Said Banner. “Where have I seen you before?”

               “I am a total stranger,” Thor lied firmly. After all, Banner had only met him long enough to comment on his nervousness before, so it was almost true. He ought to have been thanking his stars for the lucky escape he’d had then, he supposed, but in fact his main thought was, Good gracious! Wizard Banner is only a child in his thirties, for all his wickedness! It made such a difference to be old, he thought as he turned the bacon over in the pan. And he would have died rather than let this man know he was the person he had pitied on May Day. Hearts and smashing did not enter into it. Banner was not going to know.

               “He says his name’s Thor,” Peter said. “He came last night.”

               “How did he make Hulk bend down?” said Banner.

               “Thor bullied Hulk!” Hulk said in a piteous, muffled voice from under the sizzling pan.

               “Not many people can do that,” Banner said thoughtfully. He propped his guitar in the corner and came over to the hearth. The smell of various spices mixed with the smell of bacon as he shoved Thor firmly aside. “Hulk doesn’t like anyone but me to cook on him,” he said, kneeling down and wrapping one sleeve round his hand to hold the pan. “Pass me two more slices of bacon and six eggs, please, and tell me why you’ve come here.”

               Thor stared at the glasses folded over his front pocket and passed him egg after egg. “Why I came, young man?” he said. It was obvious after what he had seen of the castle. “I came because I’m your new cleaning lady, of course.”

               “Are you indeed?” Banner said, cracking the eggs one-handed and tossing the shells among the logs, where Hulk seemed to be eating them with a lot of snarling and gobbling. “Who says you are?”

               “ _I_ do,” said Thor, and he added piously, “I can clean the dirt from this place even if I can’t clean from your wickedness, young man.”

               “Mist – _Doctor_ – Banner isn’t wicked,” Peter said.

               “Yes I am,” Banner contradicted him. “You forget just how wicked I’m being at the moment, Peter.” He jerked his chin at Thor. “If you’re so anxious to be of use, my good man, find some knives and forks and clear the bench.”

               There were tall stools under the workbench. Peter was pulling them out to sit on and pushing aside all the things on top of it to make room for some knives and forks he had taken from a drawer in the side of it. Thor went to help him. He had not expected Banner to welcome him, of course, but he had not even so far agreed to let him stay beyond breakfast. Since Peter did not seem to need help, Thor shuffled over to his stick and put it slowly and showily in the broom cupboard. When that did not seem to attract Banner’s attention, he said, “You can take me on for a month’s trial, if you like.”

               Wizard Banner said nothing but “Plates, please, Peter,” and stood up holding the smoking pan. Hulk sprang up with a roar of relief and blazed high in the chimney.

               Thor made another attempt to pin the Wizard down. “If I’m going to be cleaning here for the next month,” he said, “I’d like to know where the rest of the castle is. I can only find this one room and the bathroom.”

               To his surprise, both Peter and the Wizard roared with laughter.

               It was not until they had almost finished breakfast that Thor discovered what had made them laugh. Banner was not only hard to pin down. He seemed to dislike answering any questions at all. Thor gave up asking him and asked Peter instead.

               “Tell him,” said Banner, “It will stop his pestering.”

               “There isn’t any more of the castle,” Peter said, “except what you’ve seen and two bedrooms upstairs.”

               “What?” Thor exclaimed.

               Banner and Peter laughed again. “Banner and Hulk invented the castle,” Peter explained, “and Hulk keeps it going. The inside of it is really just Banner’s old house in Jotunheim, which is the only real part.”

               “But Jotunheim’s miles down near the sea!” Thor said. “I call that too bad! What do you mean by having this great, ugly castle rushing about the hills and frightening everyone in Asgard to death?”

               Banner shrugged. “What an outspoken old man you are! I’ve reached the stage in my career where I need to impress everyone with my power and wickedness. I can’t have the King thinking well of me. And last year I offended someone very powerful and I need to keep out of their way.”

               It seemed a funny way to avoid someone, but Thor supposed wizards had different standards from ordinary people. And he shortly discovered that the castle had other peculiarities. They had finished eating and Peter was piling the plates in the slimy sink beside the bench when there came a loud, hollow knocking at the door.

               Hulk blazed up. “Wakanda door!”

               Banner, who was on his way to the bathroom, went to the door instead. There was a square wooden knob above the door, set into the lintel, with a dab of paint on each of it’s four sides. At that moment there was a green blob on the side that was at the bottom, but Banner turned the knob around so that it had a red blob downward before he opened the door.

               Outside stood a personage clothed in scarlet and purple and gold, and he held up a little staff carved with intricate patterns. He bowed. “His Majesty, King T’Challa, presents his compliments and sends payment for two thousand pairs of seven-league boots,” this person said.

               Behind him, Thor had glimpses of a coach waiting in a street full of tall and advanced houses, and towers and spires and domes beyond that, of a splendor he had barely before imagined. He was sorry it took so little time for the person at the door to hand over a long, silken, clinking purse, and for Banner to take the purse, bow back, and shut the door. Banner turned the square knob back so that the green blob was downward again and stowed the long purse in his pocket. Thor saw Peter’s eyes follow the purse in an urgent, worried way.

               Banner went straight to the bathroom then, calling out, “I need hot water in here, Hulk!” and was gone for a long, long time.

               Thor could not restrain his curiosity. “Whoever was that at the door?” he asked Peter. “Or do I mean _wherever_?”

               “That door gives on Wakanda,” Peter said, “where the King lives. And,” he added worriedly to Hulk, “I do wish that man hadn’t given Doctor Banner all that money.”

               “Is Banner going to let me stay here?” Thor asked.

               “If he is, you’ll never pin him down,” Peter answered. “He hates being pinned down to anything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hardly proofread this and im a whole dumbass So Please point out mistakes if ya see em


	5. Which is far too full of washing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor begins his new job.

               The only thing to do, Thor decided, was to show Banner that he was an excellent cleaning lady, a real treasure. He rolled his sleeves up his skinny arms and wrapped an old tablecloth from the broom cupboard around him as an apron. It was rather a relief to think there were only four rooms to clean instead of a whole castle. He grabbed up a bucket and broom and got to work.

               “What are you doing?” cried Peter and Hulk cried in a horrified chorus.

               “Cleaning up,” Thor replied firmly. “The place is a disgrace.”

               Hulk said, “It doesn’t need it,” and Peter muttered, “Banner will kick you out!” but Thor ignored them both. Dust flew in clouds.

               In the midst of it there came another set of thumps at the door. Hulk blazed up, calling, “Jotunheim door!” and gave a great, sizzling sneeze which shot purple sparks through the dust clouds.

               Peter left the workbench and went to the door. Thor peered through the dust he was raising and saw that this time Peter turned the square knob over the door so that the side with a blue blob of paint on it was downward. Then he opened the door on the street Thor saw out of the window.

               A small girl stood there. “Please, Mr. Parker,” she said, “I’ve come for that spell for me mum.”

               “Safety spell for your dad’s boat, wasn’t it?” Peter said. “Won’t be a moment.” He went back to the bench and measured powder from a jar from the shelves into a square of paper. While he was doing it, the little girl peered in at Thor as curiously as Thor peered out at her. Peter twisted the paper around the powder and came back saying, “Tell her to sprinkle it right along the boat. It’ll last out and back, even if there’s a storm.”

               The girl took the paper and passed over a coin. “Has the Sorcerer got another wizard working for him too?” she asked.

               “No,” said Peter.

               “Meaning me?” Thor called. “Oh, yes, my child. I’m the best and cleanest wizard in Yggdrasil.”

               Peter shut the door, looking exasperated. “That will be all around Jotunheim now. Dr. Banner may not like that.” He turned the knob green-down again.

               Thor cackled to himself a little, quite unrepentant. It might persuade Banner to let him stay if everyone thought he was working for him. It was odd. As a boy, Thor would have shriveled with embarrassment at the way he was behaving. As an old man, he did not mind what he did or said. He found that a great relief.

               He went nosily over as Peter lifted up a stone in the hearth and hid the little girl’s coin under it. “What are you doing?”

               “Hulk and I try to keep a store of money,” Peter said rather guiltily. “Dr. Banner spends every penny we’ve got on supplies if we don’t.”

               “Banner can spend King’s money faster than Hulk burn log. No sense.” Hulk crackled.

               Thor sprinkled water from the sink to lay the dust, which made Hulk shrink back against the chimney. Then he swept the floor all over again. He swept his way toward the door in order to have a look at the square knob above it. The fourth side, which he had not seen used yet, had a blob of black pain on it. Wondering where that led to, Thor began briskly sweeping the cobwebs off the beams. Peter moaned, and Hulk sneezed again.

               Banner came out of the bathroom just then in a waft of steam. He looked rather rumpled; hair still wet and dripping, shirt still damp in areas. He took one look at the scene and backed into the bathroom again.

               “Stop it!” he said. “Leave those poor spiders alone!”

               “These cobwebs are a disgrace!” Thor declared, fetching them down in bundles.

               “Then get them down and leave the spiders,” said Banner.

               Probably he had a wicked affinity with spiders, Thor thought. “They’ll only make more webs,” he said.

               “And kill flies, which is very useful,” said Banner. “Keep that broom still while I cross my own room, please.”

               Thor leaned on the broom and watched Banner cross the room and pick up his guitar. As he put his hand on the door latch, Thor said, “If the red blob leads to Wakanda and the blue blob goes to Jotunheim, where does the black blob take you?”

               “What a nosy old man you are!” said Banner. “That leads to my private bolt hole and you are not being told where it is.” He opened the door onto the wide, moving moorland and the hills.

               “When will you be back, Dr. Banner?” Peter asked a little despairingly.

               Banner pretended not to hear. He said to Thor. “You’re not to kill a single spider while I’m away.” And the door slammed behind him. Peter looked meaningfully at Hulk and sighed. Hulk crackled with malicious laughter.

               Since nobody explained where Banner had gone, Thor concluded he was off to hunt for hearts to smash again and got down to work with more righteous vigor than ever. He did not dare harm any spiders after what Banner had said. So he banged at the beams with the broom, screaming “Out, spiders! Out of my way!” Spiders scrambled for their lives every which way, and webs fell in swathes. Then of course he had to sweep the floor yet again. After that, he got down on his knees and scrubbed it.

               “I wish you’d stop!” Peter said, sitting on the stairs out of his way.

               Hulk, cowering at the back of the grate, muttered, “Hulk wish Hulk never made bargain now!”

               Thor scrubbed on vigorously. “You’ll be much happier when it’s all nice and clean,” he said.

               “But I’m miserable _now_!” Peter protested.

               Banner did not come back again until late that night. By that time Thor had swept and scrubbed himself into a state when he could hardly move. He was sitting hunched up in the chair, aching all over. Peter took hold of Banner by his shirt sleeve and towed him over to the bathroom, where Thor could hear him pouring out complaints in a passionate mutter. Phrases like “terrible old man” and “won’t listen to a _word!_ ” were quite easy to hear, even though Hulk was roaring, “Banner! Stop him! He’s killing Hulk and Peter!”

               But all Banner said, when Peter let go of him, was “Did you kill any spiders?”

               “Of course not!” Thor snapped. His aches made him irritable. “They look at me and they run for their lives. What are they? All the people whose hearts you smashed?”

               Banner laughed. “No, just simple spiders,” he said and went dreamily away upstairs.

               Peter sighed. He went into the broom cupboard and hunted until he found an old folding bed, a straw mattress, and some rugs, which he put into the arched space under the stairs. “You’d better sleep here tonight,” he told Thor.

               “Does that mean Banner’s going to let me stay?” Thor asked.

               “I don’t know!” Peter said irritably. “Dr. Banner never commits himself to anything. I was here six months before he seemed to notice I was living here and made me his apprentice. I just thought a bed would be better than the chair.”

               “Then thank you very much,’ Thor said gratefully. The bed was indeed more comfortable than a chair, and when Hulk complained he was hungry in the night, it was an easy matter for Thor to creak his way out and give him another log.

               In the days that followed, Thor cleaned his way remorselessly through the castle. He really enjoyed himself. Telling himself he was looking for clues, he washed the window, he cleaned out the oozing sink, and he made Peter clear everything off the workbench and the shelves so that he could scrub them. He had everything out of the cupboards and down from the beams and cleaned those too. The human skull, he fancied, began to look as longsuffering as Peter. It had been moved so often. Then he tacked an old sheet to the beams nearest the fireplace and forced Hulk to bend his head down while he swept the chimney. Hulk hated that. He crackled with mean laughter when Thor discovered that soot had got all over the room and he had to clean it all again. That was Thor’s trouble. He was remorseless, but he lacked method. But there was this method to his remorselessness: he calculated that he could not clean this thoroughly without sooner or later coming across Banner’s hidden hoard of smashed hearts – or else something that explained Hulk’s contract. Up the chimney, guarded by Hulk, had struck him as a good hiding place. But there was nothing there but quantities of soot, which Thor stored in bags in the yard. The yard was high on his list of hiding places.

               Every time Banner came in, Peter and Hulk complained loudly about Thor. But Banner did not seem to attend. Nor did he notice the cleanliness. And nor did he notice that the food closet became very well stocked with cakes and jam and the occasional lettuce.

               For, as Peter had prophesied, word had gone around Jotunheim. People came to the door to look at Thor. They called him Mr. Wizard in Jotunheim and Sir Sorcerer in Wakanda. Word had gone around the capital too. Though the people who came to the Wakanda door were better dressed than those in Jotunheim, no one in either place liked to call on someone so powerful without an excuse. So Thor was always having to pause in his work to nod and smile and take in a gift, or get Peter to put up a quick spell for someone. Some of the gifts were nice things – pictures, strings of shells, and useful aprons. Thor used the aprons daily and hung the shells and pictures around his cubbyhole under the stairs, which soon began to look very homelike indeed.

               Thor knew he would miss this when Banner turned him out. He became more and more afraid he would. He knew he could not go on ignoring him forever.

               He cleaned the bathroom next. That took him days, because Banner spent so long in it every day before he went out. As soon as he went, leaving it full of steam and the smell of spices, Thor moved in. “Now we’ll see about that contract!” he muttered at the bath, but his main target was of course the shelf of packets, jars, and tubes. He took every one of them down, on the pretext of scrubbing the shelf, and spent most of a day carefully going through them to see if the ones labeled **SKIN** and **HAIR** were in fact pieces of people. As far as he could tell, they were all just creams and powders. If they had once been people, then Thor thought Banner had used the tube **FOR DECAY** on them on them and rotted them down the washbasin too thoroughly to recall. But he hoped they were only cosmetics in the packets.

               He put the things back on the shelf and scrubbed. That night, as he sat aching in the chair, Hulk grumbled that he had drained one hot spring dry for him.

               “Where are the hot springs?” Thor asked. He was curious about everything these days.

               “Under Jotunheim marshes,” Hulk said. “But if Thor use too much, Hulk will have to fetch water from Sakaar. Finish cleaning and figure out contract.”

               “I’m trying,” said Thor. “How can I get the terms out of Banner if he’s never in? Is he always away this much?”

               “Only when Banner stumped on project,” Hulk said.

               When the bathroom was clean and gleaming, Thor scrubbed the stairs and the landing upstairs. Then he moved on into Peter’s small front room. Peter, who by this time seemed to be accepting Thor gloomily as sort of natural disaster, gave a yell of dismay and pounded upstairs to rescue his most treasured possessions. As he hurried them protectively away, Thor flung the window open – it opened into the street in Jotunheim too – and heaved his bedding across the sill to air.

               He swept such quantities of dust and rubbish from Peter’s room that he nearly swamped Hulk trying to burn it all.

               “Thor will be the death of Hulk! Thor as heartless as Banner!” Hulk choked. Only his black hair and a green piece of his long forehead showed.

               Peter put his box of possessions in the drawer of the workbench and locked the drawer. “I wish Banner would listen to us!” he said. “Why is this project taking him so long?”

               The next day Thor tried to start on the backyard. But it was raining in Jotunheim that day, driving against the window and pattering the chimney, making Hulk hiss with annoyance. The yard was part of the Jotunheim house too, so it was pouring out there when Thor opened the door. He put his apron over his head and rummaged a little, and before he got too wet, he found a bucket of whitewash and a large paintbrush. He took these indoors and set to work on the walls. He found an old stepladder in the broom cupboard and he whitewashed the ceiling between the beams too. It rained for the next two days in Jotunheim, though when Banner opened the door with the knob green-blob-down and stepped out onto the hill, the weather was sunny, with big cloud shadows racing over the heather faster than the castle could move. Thor whitewashed his cubbyhole, the stairs, the landing, and Peter’s room.

               “What’s happened in here?” Banner asked when he came in on the third day. “It seems much lighter.”

               “Thor,” Peter said in a voice of doom.

               “I should have guessed,” Banner said as he disappeared into the bathroom.

               “He _noticed_!” Peter whispered to Hulk. “He must be getting somewhere with his project at last!”

               It was still drizzling in Jotunheim the next day. Thor tied on a headcloth, rolled up his sleeves, and girded on his apron. He collected his broom, his bucket, and his soap, and as soon as Banner was out of the door, he set off like and elderly avenging angel to clean Banner’s bedroom.

               He had left that until last for fear of what he would find. He had not even dared peep into it. And that was silly, he thought as he hobbled up the stairs. By now it was clear that Hulk did all the strong magic in the castle and Peter did all the hackwork, while Banner was out working on his “projects” – whatever that meant. Thor had never found Banner particularly frightening.

               He arrived on the landing and found Banner standing in the doorway of his bedroom. He was leaning lazily on one hand, completely blocking his way.

               “No you don’t,” he said quite pleasantly. “I want it dirty, thank you.”

               Thor gaped at him. “Where did you come from? I saw you go out.”

               “I meant you to,” said Banner. “You’d done your worst with Hulk and poor Peter. It stood to reason you’d descend on me today. And whatever Hulk told you, I _am_ a – a wizard, you know.” He stumbled over the word “wizard”. Peculiar. “Didn’t you think I could do magic?”

               This undermined all Thor’s assumptions. He would have died rather than admit it. “Everyone knows you’re a wizard, young man,” he said severely. “But that doesn’t alter the fact that your castle is the dirtiest place I’ve ever been in.” He looked into the room past Banner’s purple sleeve. The carpet on the floor was littered like a bird’s nest. He glimpsed peeling walls and a shelf full of books, some of them rather odd-looking. There was no sign of smashed hearts, but those were probably behind or under the huge fourposter bed. Its hangings were gray-white with dust and they prevented him from seeing what the window looked out onto.

               Banner swung his hand in front of his face. “Uh-uh. Don’t be nosy.”

               “I’m not being nosy!” Thor protested. “That room –“

               “Yes, you _are_ nosy,” said Banner. “You’re a dreadfully nosy, horribly bossy, appallingly clean old man. Control yourself. You’re victimizing us all.”

               “But it’s a pigsty,” said Thor. “I can’t help what I am!”

               “Yes you can,” said Banner. “And I like my room the way it is. You must admit I have the right to live in a pigsty if I want. Now go downstairs and thing of something else to do. Please. I hate quarreling with people.”

               There was nothing Thor could do but hobble away with his bucket clanking by his side. He was a little shaken, and very surprised that Banner had not thrown him out of the castle on the spot. But since he had not, he thought of the next thing that needed doing at once. He opened the door beside the stairs, found the drizzle almost stopped, and sallied out into the yard, where he began vigorously sorting through piles of dripping rubbish

               There was a metallic _clash!_ and Banner appeared again, stumbling slightly, in the middle of the large sheet of rusty iron Thor had been going to move next.

               “Not here either,” he said. “You’re a terror, aren’t you? Leave this yard alone. I know just where everything is in it, and I won’t be able to find the things I need for my transport equip – _spells_ if you tidy them up.” There it was again! The stuttering over words that had to do with magic. Odd.

               Anyway, there probably was a bundle of smashed hearts somewhere out here, Thor thought. He felt really thwarted. “Tidying up is what I’m _here_ for!” he shouted at Banner.

               “Then you must think of a new meaning for your life,” Banner said. For a moment it seemed as if he was going to lose his temper too. His strange, bright green eyes all but glared at Thor. But he controlled himself and said, “Now trot along indoors, you overactive old thing, and find something else to play with before I get angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. I hate losing my temper.”

               Thor folded his skinny arms. He did not like being glared at by eyes that shown like lights. “Of course you hate losing your temper!” he retorted. “You don’t like anything unpleasant, do you? You’re a slitherer-outer, that’s what you are! You slither away from anything you don’t like!”

               Banner gave a forced sort of smile. “Well now,” he said. “Now we both know each other’s faults. Now go back into the house. Go on. Back.” He advanced on Thor, waving him toward the door. The sleeve on his waving arm caught the edge of the rusty metal, jerked, and tore. “Damnit!” said Banner, holding up his torn sleeve. “Look what you’ve made me do!”

               “I can mend it,” Thor said.

               Banner gave him another bright-green look. “There you go again,” he said. “How you must love servitude!” he rummaged around in his pockets before pulling out a metal device, which had what appeared to be a black spool of thread in it. He ran the device over the tear, and when he removed it, the shirt was mended. “There,” he said. “Understand?”

               Thor hobbled back indoors, rather chastened. Wizards clearly had no need to work in the ordinary way. Banner had shown him he really was a wizard to be reckoned with. “Why didn’t he turn me out?” he said, half to himself and half to Peter.

               “It beats me,” said Peter. “But I think he goes by Hulk. Most people who come in here either don’t notice Hulk, or they’re scared stiff of him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im channeling bruce's asshole self (and the spirit of diana wynne jones) from the indestructible hulk into this........


	6. In which Banner expresses his feelings with green slime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IT'S SLIME TIME BABEY!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i only have a vague sense of how to isolate dna.
> 
> also the bathroom is bruce's lab bc why the Fock Not

               Banner did not go out that day, nor for the next few days. Thor sat quietly in the chair by the hearth, keeping out of his way and thinking. He saw that, much as Banner deserved it, he had been taking out his feelings on the castle when he was really angry with the Grandmaster. And he was a little upset at the thought that he was here on false pretenses. Banner might think Hulk liked him, but Thor knew Hulk had simply seized on the chance to make a bargain with him. Thor rather thought he had let Hulk down.

               This state of mind did not last. Thor discovered a pile of Peter’s clothes that needed mending. He hunted around the workbench for a thimble, scissors, and thread and set to work. By that evening he was cheerful enough to join in Hulk’s silly little song about saucepans.

               “Happy in your work?” Banner said sarcastically.

               “I need more to do,” Thor said.

               “My old sport jacket needs mending, if you have to feel busy,” said Banner.

               This seemed to mean that Banner was no longer annoyed. Thor was relieved. He had been almost frightened this morning.

               It was clear Banner had not yet figured out his ‘project’. Thor listened to Peter asking rather obvious questions about it, and Banner slithering neatly out of answering any of them. “He _is_ a slitherer-outer,” Thor murmured to a pair of Peter’s socks. “Can’t face his own wickedness.” He watched Banner being restlessly busy in order to hide his discontent. That was something Thor understood rather well.

               At the bench Banner worked a good deal harder and faster than Peter, putting spells together in an expert but slapdash way. From the look on Peter’s face, most of the spells were both unusual and hard to do. But Banner would leave a spell midway and dash up to his bedroom to look after something hidden – and no doubt sinister – going on up there, and then shortly race out into the yard to tinker with a large spell out there. Thor opened the door a crack and was rather amazed to see the wizard kneeling in the mud while he carefully heaved a tangle of greasy metal into a special framework of some kind.

               The spell was for the King. Another messenger arrived with a letter and a long, long speech in which he wondered if Banner could possibly spare time, no doubt valuably employed in other ways, to bend his powerful and ingenious mind to a small problem experienced by King T’Challa – to whit, how an army might get its heavy wagons through marsh and rough ground. Banner was wonderfully polite and longwinded in his reply. He said no. But the messenger spoke for a further half-hour, at the end of which Banner agreed to do the spell.

               “This is a bit ominous,” Banner said to Peter when the messenger had gone. “What did Stark have to get himself lost in Sakaar for? The King seems to think I’ll do instead.”

               “He wasn’t as inventive as you, by all accounts,” Peter said.

               “I’m too patient and too polite,” Banner said gloomily. “I should have overcharged him even more.”

               Banner was equally patient and polite with customers from Jotunheim, but, as Peter anxiously pointed out, the trouble was that Banner did not charge these people enough. This was after Banner had listened for an hour to the reasons why a seaman’s wife could not pay him a penny yet, and then promised a sea captain a wind spell for almost nothing. Banner eluded Peter’s arguments by giving him a magic lesson.

               Thor sewed buttons on Peter’s shirts and listened to Banner going through a spell with Peter. “I know _I’m_ slapdash,” he was saying, “but there’s no need for you to copy me. Always read the equation right through, carefully, first. The type of it should tell you a lot, whether it’s ionic, or covalent, or a reduction or oxidation, or a mix of those. When you’ve decided that, go through again and decide which bits are polyatomic ions or a more complex compound. You’re getting to the more complex kinds now. You’ll find everything has different properties and responses. Now take this proced – _spell_ …”

               Listening to Peter’s halting replies to Banner’s questions and watching Banner scribble remarks on the paper with a strange, everlasting quill pen, Thor realized that he could learn a lot too. It dawned on him that if Loki could discover the spell to swap himself and Hela about at the Sanctum, then he ought to be able to do the same here. With a bit of luck, there might be no need to rely on Hulk.

               When Banner was satisfied that Peter had forgotten all about how much or little he charged people in Jotunheim, he took him out into the yard to help with the King’s spell. Thor creaked to his feet and hobbled to the bench. The spell did not look like what he thought a spell would look like. There were bunches of weird symbols and numbers. He frowned. “C6H12O6 \+ 6O2 = 6CO2 \+ 6H2O?” he asked the skull. “What does that mean?”

               Banner, it seemed to Thor, went and examined all the things he had moved when he came in from the yard. But that seemed to be only restlessness. He seemed not to know what to do with himself after that. Thor heard him roving up and down during the night. He was only an hour in the bathroom the next morning. He seemed not to be able to contain himself while Peter put on his best red velvet suit, ready to go to the Palace in Wakanda, and the two of them wrapped the bulky spell up in golden paper. The spell must have been surprisingly light for its size. Peter could carry it on his own easily, with both his arms wrapped around it. Banner turned the knob over the door red-down for him and sent him out into the street among the painted houses.

               “They’re expecting it,” Banner said. “You should only have to wait most of the morning. Tell them a child could work it. Show them. And when you come back, I’ll have a spell for you to work on. So long.”

               He shut the door and roved around the room again. “My feet itch,” he said suddenly. “I’m going for a walk on the hills. Tell Peter the spell I promised him is on the bench. And here’s for you to keep busy with.”

               Thor found a brown sport coat dropped into a lap from nowhere. Banner meanwhile picked up his guitar from its corner, turned the doorknob green-down, and stepped out among the scudding heather above Asgard.

               “ _Banner_ feet itch!” grumbled Hulk. There was a fog down in Jotunheim. Hulk was low among his logs, moving uneasily this way and that to avoid drips in the chimney. “How does Banner think _Hulk_ feel, stuck in wet grate like this?”

               “Then you’ll have to give me a hint at least about how to break your contract,” Thor said, shaking out the brown sport coat. “Goodness, you’re a fine jacket, even if you are a bit worn!”

               “Hulk _has_ given Thor hint!” Hulk fizzed.

               “Then you’ll have to give it to me again. I didn’t catch it,” Thor said as he laid the suit down and hobbled to the door.

               “If Hulk give Thor hint and tell Thor it is hint, it is information. Hulk not allowed to give Thor information,” Hulk said. “Where is Thor going?”

               “To do something I didn’t dare do until they were both out,” Thor said. He twisted the square knob over the door until the black blob pointed downward. Then he opened the door.

               There was nothing outside. It was neither black, nor gray, nor white. It was not thick, or transparent. It did not move. It had no smell and no feel. When Thor put a very cautious finger out into it, it was neither hot nor cold. It felt of nothing. It seemed utterly and completely nothing.

               “What _is_ this?” he asked Hulk.

               Hulk was as interested as Thor. His green face was leaning right out of the grate to see the door. He had forgotten the fog. “Hulk don’t know,” he whispered. “Hulk only maintain it. All Hulk know is it on side of castle no one can walk around. It feel far away.”

               “It feels beyond the moon!” said Thor. He shut the door and turned the knob green-downward. He hesitated a minute and then started to hobble to the stairs.

               “Banner locked it,” said Hulk. “Banner told Hulk to tell you if you snoop again.”

               “Oh,” said Thor. “What has he got up there?’

               “Hulk have no idea,” said Hulk. “Hulk don’t know anything about upstairs. If Thor only knew how frustrating it is! Hulk can’t even see outside castle. Only enough to see what direction Hulk going in.”

               Thor, feeling equally frustrated, sat down and began mending the brown sport coat. Peter came in soon after that.

               “The King saw me at once,” he said. “He –“ He looked around the room. His eyes went to the empty corner where the guitar usually stood. “Oh, no!” he said. “Not his project again! I thought he had finished it!”

               Hulk fizzed wickedly. “Peter got signs wrong. Banner find project tough. Banner decided to take break to think.”

               “Bother!” said Peter. “That’s bound to mean trouble. And here was I hoping Dr. Banner was sensible again!”

               Thor banged the sport coat down on his knees. “Really!” he said. “How can you both talk like that about such utter wickedness! At least, I suppose I can’t blame Hulk, since he’s an evil demon. But you, Peter -!”

               “Hulk don’t think Hulk evil,” Hulk protested.

               “Dr. Banner isn’t doing anything evil,” Peter said. “I’m not too sure what he does, exactly. All I know is when he takes that guitar and goes out, he loses all sense.”

               “I thought Banner went out and courted people and then smashed their hearts,” Thor said. He was quite confused.

               “Then you must come from Asgard. Dr. Banner sent me down there to blacken his name when we first set up the castle. I – er – I said that sort of thing. Hulk talks about smashing a lot,” Peter looked bashful, “I um, used that as inspiration.”

               “Banner dated girl once,” Hulk said, “Betty.”

               “Oh, she was nice,” Peter said. “Until Banner broke it off – he muttered something about being heartless when I asked why he did it – and her father found the castle…” Peter shuddered. “Betty came when her father left.”

               “Betty drip on Hulk,” Hulk said scornfully.

               “She was really upset,” Peter noted sympathetically.

               Thor huffed, and didn’t say anything. He was thinking; he felt as if his whole worldview was flipped upside down.

               Peter suggested lunch and Hulk as usual had groaned when Banner flung the door open and came in, more discontented than ever.

               “Something to eat?” said Thor.

               “No,” said Banner. “Hot water in the bathroom, Hulk.” He stood moodily in the bathroom door a moment. “Thor, have you tidied this shelf of chemic – spells in here, by any chance?”

               Thor felt more foolish than ever. Nothing would have possessed him to admit that he had gone through all those packets and jars looking for pieces of person. “I haven’t touched a thing,” he replied virtuously as he went to get the frying pan.

               “I hope you didn’t,” Peter said uneasily as the bathroom door slammed.

               Rinsings and gushings came from the bathroom while Thor fried lunch. “Banner using a lot of hot water,” Hulk said from under the pan. “Hulk think he doing experiments. Hulk hope Thor did not mess with spells…”

               “What kind of man does experiments in the bathroom?” Thor asked.

               “Banner,” Hulk and Peter said in sync, “He says he does it because it has access to water and it’s private…” Peter continued, before worrying his lip. “I really hope you didn’t, Dr. Banner has real bad anger issues.”

               “Oh, shut up!” snapped Thor. “I put everything back just where I found it!” He was so cross that he emptied the pan of eggs and bacon over Hulk.

               Hulk, of course, ate them with enormous enthusiasm and much flaring and gobbling. Thor fried more over the spitting flames. He and Peter ate them. They were clearing away, and Hulk was running his green tongue around his purple lips, when the bathroom door crashed open and Banner shot out.

               “Look at this!” he shouted. “ _Look_ at it! What has that one-man force of chaos _done_ to these chemicals?”

               Thor and Peter whirled round and looked at Banner. He was holding a bottle full of clear liquid.

               “If you mean me—” Thor began.

               “I _do_ mean you! Look!” Banner yelled. He sat down with a thump on the three-legged stool and jabbed at a glass bottle with his finger. “Look. Survey. Inspect. This solution is ruined! You switched the protease enzymes with the isopropanol! This trial is ruined!”

               Peter and Thor bent nervously over to look at the contents of the bottle. It was perfectly clear throughout, like water.

               “I don’t see anything wrong,” he said, not completely sure what Banner was mad about.

               “You wouldn’t!” shouted Banner. “The DNA didn’t form a precipitate! I shall have to do the whole procedure again!” he spread his arms out passionately. “Despair!” he yelled. “Anguish! Horror!”

               The room turned dim. Huge, cloudy, human-looking shapes bellied up in all four corners and advanced on Thor and Peter, howling as they came. The howls began as moaning horror, and went up to despairing brays, and then up again to screams of pain and terror. Thor pressed his hands to his ears, but the screams pressed through his hands, louder and louder still, more horrible every second. Hulk shrank hurriedly down in the grate and flickered his way under his lowest log. Peter grabbed Thor by his elbow and dragged him to the door. He spun the knob to blue-down, kicked the door open, and got them both out into the street in Jotunheim as fast as he could.

               The noise was almost as horrible out there. Doors were opening all down the road and people were running out with their hands over their ears.

               “Ought we to leave him alone in that state?” Thor quavered.

               “Yes,” said Peter. “If he thinks it’s your fault, then definitely.”

               They hurried through the town, pursued by throbbing screams. Quite a crowd came with them. In spite of the fact that the fog had now become a seeping sea drizzle, everyone made for the harbor or the sands, where the noise seemed easier to bear. The gray vastness of the sea soaked it up a little. Everyone stood in damp huddles, looking out at the misty white horizon and the dripping ropes on the moored ships while the noise became a gigantic, heartbroken sobbing. Thor reflected that he was seeing the sea for the first time in his life. It was a pity that he was not enjoying it more.

               The sobs died away to vast, miserable sighs and then to silence. People cautiously began to go back into the town. Some of them came timidly up to Thor.

               “Is something wrong with the poor Sorcerer, Mr. Wizard?”

               “He’s a little unhappy today,” Peter said. “Come on. I think we can risk going back now.”

               As they went along the stone quayside, several sailors called out anxiously from the moored ships, wanting to know if the noise meant storms or bad luck.

               “Not at all,” Thor called back. “It’s all over now.”

               But it was not. They came back to the wizard’s house, which was an ordinary crooked little building from the outside that Thor would not have recognized if Peter had not been with him. Peter opened the shabby little door rather cautiously. Inside, Banner was still sitting on the stool. He sat in an attitude of utter despair, clutching the offending bottle in his hand. And he was covered all over in thick green slime.

               There were horrendous, dramatic, violent quantities of green slime—oodles of it. It covered Banner completely. It draped his head and shoulders in sticky dollops, heaping on his knees and hands, trickling in glops down his legs, and dripping off the stool in sticky strands. It was in oozing ponds and crawling pools over most of the floor. Long fingers of it had crept into the heart. It smelled vile.

               “Save Hulk!” Hulk cried in a hoarse whisper. He was down to two desperately flickering small flames. “This stuff is going to put Hulk out!”

               Thor held up his pant legs and marched as near Banner as he could get—which was not very near. “Stop it!” he said. “Stop it at once! You are behaving just like a _baby_!”

               Banner did not move or answer. His face stared from behind the slime, white and tragic and wide-eyed.

               “What shall we do? Is he dead?” Peter asked, jittering beside the door.

               Peter was a nice boy, Thor thought, but a bit helpless in a crisis. “No, of course he isn’t,” he said. “And if it wasn’t for Hulk, he could behave like a jellied eel all day for all I care! Open the bathroom door.”

               While Peter was working his way between pools of slime to the bathroom, Thor threw his apron into the heart to stop more of the stuff from getting near Hulk and snatched up the shovel. He scooped up loads of ash and dumped them in the biggest pools of slime. It hissed violently. The room filled with steam and smelled worse than ever. Thor furled up his sleeves, bent his back to get a good purchase on the Wizard’s slimy knees, and pushed Banner, stool and all, toward the bathroom. His feet slipped and skidded in the slime, but of course the ooziness helped the stool to move too. Peter came and pulled at Banner’s slime-draped sleeves. Together, they trundled him into the bathroom. There, since Banner still refused to move, the shunted him into the shower stall.

               “Hot water, Hulk!” Thor panted grimly. “Very hot.”

               It took an hour to wash the slime off Banner. It took Peter another hour to persuade Banner to get off the stool and into dry clothes. Luckily, in the pile of clothes Thor had yet to mend, there were some worn corduroy pants and a yellow shirt missing a button. It would have to do. The purple shirt and brown pants were ruined. Thor told Peter to put it in the bath to soak. Meanwhile, mumbling and grumbling, he fetched more hot water. He turned the doorknob green-down and swept all the slime out into the moors. The castle left a trail like a snail in the heather, but it was an easy way to get rid of the slime. There were some advantages to living in a moving castle, Thor thought as he washed the floor. He wondered if Banner’s noises had been coming from the castle too. In which case, he pitied the folk of Asgard.

               By this time Thor was tired and cross. He knew the green slime was Banner’s revenge on him, and he was not at all prepared to be sympathetic when Peter finally led Banner forth from the bathroom, clothed in yellow and brown, and sat him tenderly in the chair by the hearth.

               “Banner stupid!” Hulk sputtered. “Was Banner trying to get rid of Hulk?”

               Banner took no notice. He just sat, looking tragic and shivering.

               “I can’t get him to _speak!_ ” Peter whispered miserably.

               “It’s just a tantrum,” Thor said. Loki and Hela were good at having tantrums too. He knew how to deal with those. Anyway, Thor’s experience told him that tantrums are seldom about the thing they appear to be about. He made Hulk move over so that he could balance a pan of milk on the logs. When it was warm, he thrust a mugful into Banner’s hands. “Drink it,” he said. “Now, what was all this fuss about? Is it this project you’re working on?”

               Banner sipped the milk dolefully. “Yes,” he said. “I left it alone to see if that would make me have any breakthroughs, and it hasn’t. The gamma radiation hardly altered the chemical makeup at all!”

               He sounded so miserable that Thor felt quite sorry for him, even if he had no idea what Banner was talking about. A confused glimpse at Peter showed that he was clueless as well.

               “I thought magic – the real kind – would help it, but it hasn’t!”

               Thor’s sympathy shrank quite sharply. It occurred to him that if Banner could cover himself with green slime so easily, then he could just fix whatever was wrong with the liquid in the bottle. “Why don’t you just make a potion for that sort of thing and get it over with?” he said.

               “It doesn’t transfer over!” said Banner, quite vaguely. That was the only explanation he offered on the topic. Thor’s sympathy rather disappeared for good. If he wasn’t going to explain himself and let someone help him, then he shouldn’t have filled the castle with slime, or thrown a tantrum.

               Thor found himself getting quite sick of this castle and the problems that came with it.

              


	7. In which a scarecrow prevents Thor from leaving the castle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry it took me so long to update this, haha

               Only a particularly bad attack of aches and pains prevented Thor from setting out for Asgard that evening. But the drizzle in Jotunheim had got into his bones. He lay in his cubbyhole and ached and planned on leaving. For good.

               Thor was still creaking when he got up the next morning. “ _Curse_ the Grandmaster!” he muttered to his stick as he got it out, ready to leave. He could hear Banner talking to himself in the bathroom as if he had never had a tantrum in his life. He tiptoed to the door as fast as he could hobble.

               Banner of course came out of the bathroom before he reached it. Thor looked at him sourly. He was donning one of his rumpled brown suits. The sunlight dazzled off his eyes, which were bright with excitement.

“I finally had a breakthrough,” he said.

“Did you indeed?” grumped Thor.

               “Seems your rifling helped some,” said Banner. “Are you sure you don’t have any experience in molecular biochemistry?”

               Thor didn’t know what half those words meant. Instead of saying this, he merely huffed in response.

               Banner stopped with his hand on the knob above the door.

               “Aches and pains troubling you?” he said. “Or has something annoyed you?”

               “Annoyed?” said Thor. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Jotunheim, and scared Hulk to a cinder. Why should that annoy me?”

               Banner laughed. “I apologize,” he said, turning the knob to red-down. “The King wants to see me today. I shall probably be kicking my heels in the Palace until evening, but I can do something for your rheumatism when I get back. Don’t forget to tell Peter I left that spell for him on the bench.” He smiled sunnily at Thor and stepped out among the spires of Wakanda.

               “And you think that makes it all right!” Thor growled as the door shut. But the smile had mollified him. “If that smile works on _me_ , then it’s no wonder it worked so well on that poor girl Betty!” he muttered.

               “Hulk need log before you go,” Hulk reminded him.

               Thor hobbled to drop another log into the grate. Then he set off to the door again. But here Peter came running downstairs and snatched the remains of a loaf off the bench as he ran to the door. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said in an agitated way. “I’ll bring a fresh loaf when I come back. I’ve got something very urgent to see to today, but I’ll be back by evening. If the sea captain calls for his wind spell, it’s on the end of the bench, clearly labelled.” He turned the doorknob green-downward and jumped out onto the windy hillside, loaf clutched to his stomach. “See you!” he shouted as the castle trundled away past him and the door slammed.

               “Botheration!” said Thor. “Hulk, how does a person open the door when there’s no one inside the castle?”

               “Hulk open it for you, or Peter. Banner does it himself,” said Hulk.

               So no one would be locked out when Thor left. He was not at all sure he would be coming back, but he did not intend to tell Hulk. He gave Peter time to get well on the way to wherever he was going and set off for the door again. This time Hulk stopped him.

               “If Thor going to be away long,” he said, “leave logs where Hulk can reach them.”

               “ _Can_ you pick up logs?” Thor asked, intrigued in spite of his impatience.

               For answer, Hulk stretched out a green arm-shaped flame divided into fingerlike flames at the end. It was not very long, nor did it seem all that strong. “See? Hulk can almost reach hearth,” he said proudly.

               Thor stacked a pile of logs in front of the grate so that Hulk could at least reach the top one. “You’re not to burn them until you’ve got them in the grate,” he warned him, and he set off for the door yet again.

               This time somebody knocked on it before he got there.

               It was one of those days, Thor thought. It must be the sea captain. He put up his hand to turn the knob blue-down.

               “No, it’s castle door,” Hulk said. “But Hulk not sure—”

               Then it was Peter back for some reason, Thor thought as he opened the door.

               A turnip face leered at him. He smelled mildew. Against the wide blue sky, a ragged arm ending in the stump of a stick wheeled around and tried to paw at him. It was a scarecrow. It was only made of sticks and rags, but it was alive, and it was trying to come in.

               “Hulk!” Thor screamed. “Make the castle go faster!”

               The stone blocks around the doorway crunched and grated. The green-brown moorland was suddenly rushing past. The scarecrow’s stick arm thumped on the door, and then went scraping along the wall of the castle as it left it behind. It wheeled its other arm around and seemed to try to clutch at the stonework. It meant to get into the castle if it could.

               Thor slammed the door shut. This, he thought, just showed how stupid it was for a middle child to try to seek his fortune! That was the scarecrow he had propped in the hedge on his way to the castle. He had made jokes to it. Now, as if his jokes had brought it to evil life, it had followed him all the way here and tried to paw at his face. He ran to the window to see if the thing was still trying to get into the castle.

               Of course, all he could see was a sunny day in Jotunheim, with a dozen sails going up a dozen masts beyond the rooves opposite, and a cloud of seagulls circling in the blue sky.

               “That’s the difficulty of being in several places at once!” Thor said to the human skull on the bench.

               Then, all at once, he discovered the real drawback to being an old man. His heart gave a leap and a little stutter, and then seemed to be trying to bang its way out of his chest. It hurt. He shook all over and his knees trembled. He rather thought he might be dying. It was all he could do to get to the chair by the hearth. He sat their panting, clutching his chest.

               “Is something wrong?” Hulk asked.

               “Yes. My heart. There was a scarecrow at the door!” Thor gasped.

               “What does scarecrow got to do with Thor’s heart?” Hulk asked.

               “It was trying to get in here. It gave me a terrible fright. And my heart—but you wouldn’t understand, you silly young demon!” Thor panted. “You haven’t got a heart.”

               “Yes, Hulk have,” Hulk said, as proudly as he had revealed his arm. “Down in glowing part under logs. Can Hulk reduce speed of castle now?”

               “Only if the scarecrow’s gone,” said Thor. “Has it?”

               “Hulk can’t tell,” said Hulk. “It is not flesh and blood. Hulk told you Hulk can’t really see outside.”

               Thor got up and dragged himself to the door again, feeling ill. He opened it slowly and cautiously. Green steepness, rocks, and purple slopes whirled past, making him feel dizzy, but he took a grip on the door frame and leaned out to look along the wall to the moorland they were leaving behind. The scarecrow was about fifty yards to the rear. It was hopping from clump to heather clump with a sinister sort of valiance, holding its fluttering stick arms at an angle to balance it on the hillside. As Thor watched, the castle left it further behind. It was slow, but it was following. He shut the door.

               “It’s still there,” he said. “Hopping after us. Go faster.”

               “But that upsets Hulk’s plans,” Hulk explained. “Hulk was trying to circle hills and get back to where Peter left us in time to pick him up.”

               “Then go twice as fast and circle the hills twice. As long as you leave that horrible thing behind!” Said Thor.

               “What fuss!” Hulk grumbled. But he increased the castle’s speed. Thor could actually, for the first time, feel it rumbling around him as he sat huddled in his chair wondering if he was dying. He did not want to die yet, before he could talk to his siblings again.

               As the day went on, everything in the castle began to jiggle with its speed. Bottles clinked. The skull clattered on the bench. Thor could hear things falling off the shelf in the bathroom and splashing into the bath where Banner’s ruined clothes were soaking. He began to feel a little better. He dragged himself to the door again and looked out. The ground was streaking past underneath. The hills seemed to be spinning slowly as the castle sped across them. The grinding and rumbling nearly deafened him, and smoke was puffing out behind in blasts. But the scarecrow was a tiny black dot on a distant slope by then. Next time he looked, it was out of sight entirely.

               “Good. Then Hulk will stop for night,” said Hulk. “That was difficult.”

               The rumbling died away. Things stopped jiggling. Hulk went to sleep, in the way fires do, sinking among the logs until they were rosy cylinders plated with white ash, with only a hint of blue and green deep underneath.

               Thor felt quite spry again by then. He went and fished six packets and a bottle out of the slimy water in the bath. The packets were soaked. He did not dare leave them that way after yesterday, so he laid them on the floor and, very cautiously, sprinkled them with the stuff labeled **DRYING POWER**. They were dry almost instantly. This was encouraging. Thor let the water out of the bath and tried the **POWER** on Banner’s clothes. They dried too. They were still stained green and rather smaller than they had been, but it cheered Thor up to find he could put at least something right.

               He felt cheerful enough to busy himself getting supper. He bundled everything on the bench into a heap round the skull at open end and began chopping onions. “At least _your_ eyes don’t water, my friend,” he told the skull. “Count your blessings.”

               The door sprang open.

               Thor nearly cut himself in his fright, thinking it was the scarecrow again. But it was Peter. He burst jubilantly in. He dumped a loaf, a pie, and a pink-and-white-striped box on top of the onions.

               “What’s this for, then?” Thor asked, as Peter bounded up excitedly behind him, buzzing with energy.

               “I visited my friend Ned today! He lives near that lovely bakery in Asgard,” he paused. “And do I need a reason to bring cake back to the castle?”

               As Thor started opening the box, it dawned on him that Peter had gone from seeing him as a natural disaster to actually liking him. He was so pleased and grateful that he decided to tell Peter the whole truth about himself. The box came open. It was the bakery’s most luscious cake, covered in cream and cherries and little curls of chocolate. “Oh!” said Thor.

               The square knob over the door clicked round to red-blob-down of its own accord and Banner came in. “What a marvelous cake! My favorite kind,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

               “I called into that bakery in Asgard, Dr. Banner,” Peter said. Thor looked up at Banner. Something was always going to interrupt him when he decided to say he was under a spell. Even a wizard, it seemed.

               “It looks worth the walk,” Banner said, inspecting the cake. “And is that a pie I see on the bench?” he went over to look. “Pie in a bed of raw onions. Human skull looking put-upon.” He picked up the skull and knocked an onion ring out of its eye socket. “I see Thor has been busy again. Couldn’t’ you have restrained him, my friend?”

               The skull yattered its teeth at him. Banner looked startled and put it down rather hastily.

               “Is something the matter?” Peter asked. He seemed to know the signs.

               “There is,” said Banner. “I shall have to find someone to blacken my name to the King.”

               “Was there something wrong with the wagon spell?” said Peter.

               “No. It worked perfectly. That’s the trouble,” Banner said, restlessly twiddling an onion ring on one finger. “The King’s trying to pin me down to do something else now. Hulk, if we’re not careful, he’s going to appoint me Royal Magician.” Hulk did not answer. Banner roved back to the fireside and realized Hulk was asleep. “Wake him up, Peter,” he said. “I need to consult him.”

               Peter threw two logs on Hulk and called him. Nothing happened, apart from a thin spire of smoke.

               “Hulk!” Banner shouted. That did no good either. Banner gave Peter a mystified look and picked up the poker, which was something Thor had never seen him do before. “Sorry, Hulk,” he said, jabbing under the unburned logs. “Wake _up!_ ”

               One thick black cloud of smoke rolled up, and stopped. “Go away,” Hulk grunted. “Hulk tired.”

               At this, Banner looked thoroughly alarmed. “What’s wrong with him? I’ve never known him like this before!”

               “I think it was the scarecrow,” Thor said.

               Banner swiveled round on his knees and leveled his bright green eyes at him. “What have you done _now?_ ” He went on staring while Thor explained. “A scarecrow?” he said. “Hulk agreed to speed up the castle because of a _scarecrow?_ Dear Thor, do please tell me how you bully a fire demon into being that obliging. I’d dearly love to know!”

               “I didn’t bully him,” said Thor. “It gave me a turn and he was sorry for me.”

               “It gave him a turn and Hulk was sorry for him,” Banner repeated. “My good Thor, Hulk is never sorry for anyone. Anyway, I hope you enjoy raw onions and cold pie for your supper, because you’ve almost put Hulk out.”

               “There’s the cake,” Peter said, trying to make peace.

               The food did seem to improve Banner’s temper, although he kept casting anxious looks at the unburning logs in the hearth all the time they were eating. The pie was good cold, and the onions were quite tasty when Thor had soaked them in vinegar. The cake was superb. While they were eating it, Peter risked asking Banner what the King wanted.

               “Nothing definite yet,” Banner said gloomily. “But he was sounding me out about his cousin, quite ominously. Apparently they had a good argument before Prince Erik stormed off, and people are talking. King T’Challa obviously wanted me to volunteer to look for his cousin, And like a fool and went and said I didn’t think Wizard Stark was dead, and that made matters worse.”

               “Why do you want to slither out of looking for the Prince?” Thor demanded. “Don’t you think you can find him?”

               “Rude as well as a bully, aren’t you?” Banner said. He had still not forgiven him about Hulk. “I want to get out of it because I know I _can_ find him, if you must know. Stark was doing something important for Erik, and the argument was because he told the King he was going to look for him so he could finish his work. He didn’t think the King should have sent Stark to Sakaar in the first place. Now, even you must know there is a certain man in Sakaar who is very bad news. He promised to fry me alive last year, and he sent a curse out after me that I’ve only avoided so far because I had the sense to give him a false name.”

               Thor was almost awed. “You mean you knew the Grandmaster?”

               Thor cut himself another lump of cake, looking sad and honorable. “I suppose you could put it like that. I used to be friends with him, in a sense. I admit I thought I was fond of him for a time. He is in some ways a very sad man, very unloved. Every man in Yggdrasil is cared stiff of him. _You_ ought to know how that feels, Thor dear.”

               Thor’s mouth opened in utter indignation. Peter said quickly, “Do you think we should move the castle? That’s why you invented it, wasn’t it?”

               “That depends on Hulk.” Banner looked over his shoulder at the barely smoking logs again. “I must say, if I think of the King and the Grandmaster both after me, I get a craving for planting the castle on a nice, frowning rock a thousand miles away.”

               Peter obviously wished he had not spoken. Thor could see he was thinking that a thousand miles was a terribly long way from Ned. “But what about your project,” he said to Banner, “if you up and move?”

               “I expect that will be all over by then,” Banner said absently.  “But if I could only think of a way to get the King off my back…I know!” He lifted his fork, with a melting hunk of cream and cake on it, and pointed it at Thor. “ _You_ can blacken my name to the King. You can pretend to be my old father and plead for your blue-eyed boy.” He gave Thor the smile which had no doubt charmed Betty, firing it along the fork, across the cream, straight into Thor’s eyes, dazzingly. “If you can bully Hulk, the King should give you no trouble at all.”

               Thor stared through the dazzle and said nothing. This, he thought, is where _he_ slithered out. He was leaving. It was too bad about Hulk’s contract. He had had enough of Banner. First green slime, then glaring at him for something Hulk had done quite freely, and now this! Tomorrow he would slip out and go to Loki and tell him all about it.


	8. In which Thor leaves the castle in several directions at once

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long to get out lol............

               To Thor’s relief, Hulk blazed up bright and cheerful next morning. If he had not had enough of Banner, he would have been almost touched by how glad Banner was to see Hulk.

               “I thought he’d done for you, you old ball of gas,” Banner said, kneeling at the hearth, his yellow sleeves smudged with ash.

               “Hulk was tired,” Hulk said. “There was drag on castle. Hulk never taken it that fast before.”

               “Well, don’t let him make you do it again,” said Banner. He stood up, brushing ash off his yellow button-up. “Make a start on that spell today, Peter. And if anyone comes from the King, I’m away on urgent private business until tomorrow. I’m working on my project in Midgard, but you needn’t tell him that.” He picked up his guitar and opened the door with the knob green-down, onto the wide, cloudy hills.

               The scarecrow was there again. When Banner opened the door, it pitched sideways across him with its turnip face in his chest. The guitar uttered an awful _twang-oing_. Thor gave a faint squawk of terror and hung on to the chair. One of the scarecrow’s stick arms was scraping stiffy round to get a purchase on the door. From the way Banner’s feet were braced, it was clear he was being shoved quite hard. There was no doubt that the thing was determined to get into the castle.

               Hulk’s green face leaned out of the grate. Peter stood stock still beyond. “There really is a scarecrow!” they both said.

               “Oh, is there? Do tell!” Banner panted. He got one foot up against the door frame and heaved. The scarecrow flew lumpishly away backward, to land with a light rustle in the heater some yards off. It sprang up instantly and came hopping toward the castle again. Banner hurriedly laid the guitar on the doorstep and jumped down to meet it. “No you don’t, my friend,” he said with one hand out. “Go back where you came from.” He walked forward slowly, still with his hand out. The scarecrow retreated a little, hopping slowly and warily backward. When Banner stopped, the scarecrow stopped too, with its one leg planted in the heather and its ragged arms tilting this way and that like a person sparring for an opening. The rags fluttering on its arms seemed a mad imitation of Banner’s sleeves.

               “So you won’t go?” Banner said. And the turnip head slowly moved from side to side. No. “I’m afraid you’ll have to,” Banner said. “You scare Thor, and there’s no knowing what he’ll do when he’s scared. Come to think of it, you scare me too.” Banner’s arms moved, until they were high above his head. Thor could scarcely see a small metal device in his palm, and from it emerged a wisp of blue energy that wrapped round the scarecrow until it surrounded it wholly and it began to phase out of sight, like a ghost. The turnip head was the last to go.

               Banner lowered his arms and came back to the doorway, mopping his face on the back of his hand. “I take back my hard words, Thor,” he said, panting. “That thing was alarming. It may have been dragging the castle back all yesterday. Whatever was it—all that was left of the last person you cleaned for?”

               Thor gave a weak little cackle of laughter. His heart was behaving badly again.

               Banner realized something was wrong with him. He jumped indoors across his guitar, took hold of his elbow, and sat him in the chair. “Take it easy now!” Something happened between Banner and Hulk then. Thor felt it, because he was being held by Banner, and Hulk was still leaning out of the grate. Whatever it was, his heart began to behave properly almost at once. Banner looked at Hulk, shrugged, and turned away to give Peter a whole lot of instructions about making Thor keep quiet for the rest of the day. Then he picked up the guitar and left at last.

               Thor lay in the chair and pretended to feel twice as ill as he did. He had to let Banner get out of sight. It was a nuisance he was going to Midgard as well, but he would walk so much more slowly that he would arrive around the time he started back. The important thing was not to meet him on the way. He watched Peter slyly while he spread out the spell and scratched his head over it. He waited until he dragged big, odd-looking books off the shelves and began making notes in a frantic, depressed sort of way. When he seemed properly absorbed, Thor muttered several times, “Stuffy in here!”

               Peter took no notice. “Terribly stuffy,” Thor said, getting up and shambling to the door. “Fresh air.” He opened the door and climbed out. Hulk obligingly stopped the castle dead while he did. Thor landed in the heather and took a look round to get his bearings. The road over the hills to Loki’s was a sandy line through the heater just downhill from the castle. Naturally. Hulk would not make things inconvenient for Banner. Thor set off toward it. He felt a little sad. He was going to miss Peter and Hulk.

               He was almost at the road when there was a shouting behind him. Peter came bounding down the hillside after him, and the tall black castle came bobbling along behind him, shedding anxious puffs of smoke from all four turrets.

               “What are you _doing_?” Peter said when he caught up. From the way he looked at him, Thor could see he thought the scarecrow had sent him wrong in the head.

               “I’m perfectly all right,” Thor said indignantly. “I’m simply going to see my brother—brother’s grandson.” That was close. “He’s called Loki. Now do you understand?”

               “Where does he live?” Peter demanded, as if he thought Thor might not know.

               “Midgard,” said Thor.

               “But that’s over ten miles away!” Peter said. “I promised Doctor Banner I’d make you rest. I can’t let you go. I told him I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”

               Thor did not look very kindly on this. Banner thought he was useful now because he wanted him to see the King. Of course he did not want him to leave the castle. “Huh!” he said.

               “Besides,” said Peter, slowly grasping the situation, “Banner must have gone to Midgard too.”

               “I’m quite sure he has,” said Thor.

               “Then I can’t let you go.”

               “I’m going,” said Thor.

               “But if Banner sees you there, he’ll be furious,” Peter went on, working things out. “Because I promised him, he’ll be mad with both of us. You ought to rest.” Then when Thor was almost ready to hit him, he exclaimed, “Wait! There’s a pair of seven-league boots in the broom cupboard!”

               He took Thor by his skinny old wrist and towed him uphill to the waiting castle. He was forced to give little hops in order not to catch his feet in the heather. “But,” he panted, “seven leagues is twenty-one miles! I’d be halfway to Jotunheim in two strides!”

               “No, it’s ten and a half miles a step,” said Peter. “That makes Midgard almost exactly. If we each take one boot and go together, then I won’t be letting you out of my sight and you won’t be doing anything strenuous, and we’ll get there before Banner does, so he won’t even know we’ve been. That solves all our problems beautifully!”

               Peter was so pleased with himself that Thor did not have the heart to protest. But when Peter fetched the boots from the broom cupboard, Thor began to have doubts. Up to now he had thought they were two leather buckets that had somehow lost their handles and then got a little squashed.

               “You’re supposed to put your foot in them, shoe and all,” Peter explained as he carried the two heavy, bucket-shaped things to the door. “These are the prototypes of the boots Doctor Banner made for the King’s army. We managed to get the later ones a bit lighter and more boot-shaped.” He and Thor sat on the doorstep and each put one foot in a boot. “Point yourself toward Midgard before you put the boot down,” Peter warned him. He and Thor stood up on the foot which was in an ordinary shoe and carefully swung themselves round to face Midgard. “Now tread,” said Peter.

               Zip! The landscape and sky instantly rushed past them so fast it was only a blur composed of rainbow streaks of light. The wind of their going tore at Thor’s hair and dragged every wrinkle in his face backward until he thought he would arrive with half his face behind each ear.

               The rushing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Everything was calm and sunny. They were knee-deep in buttercups in the middle of Midgard village common. A cow nearby stared at them. Beyond it, thatched cottages drowsed under trees. Unfortunately, the bucket-like boot was so heavy that Thor staggered as he landed.

               “Don’t put that foot down!” Peter yelled, too late.

               There was another zipping blur and more rushing wind. When it stopped, Thor found himself right near the marshes. Mud squelched underfoot. “Oh, drat!” he said, and hopped carefully round on his shoe and tried again.

               Zip! Blur. And he was back on Midgard green again, staggering forward with the weight of the boot. He had a glimpse of Peter diving to catch him—

               Zip! Blur. “Oh, bother!” wailed Thor. He was up in the hills again. The crooked black shape of the castle was drifting peacefully nearby. Hulk was amusing himself blowing black smoke rings from one turret. Thor saw that much before his shoe caught in the heater and he stumbled forward again.

               Zip! Zip! This time Thor visited in rapid succession the Market Square of Asgard and the front lawn of a very grand mansion. “Blow!” he cried. “Drat!” One word for each place. And he was off again with his own momentum and another Zip! right down at the end of that valley in a field somewhere. A large red bull raised its ringed nose from the grass and thoughtfully lowered its horns.

               “I’m just leaving, my good beast!” Thor cried, hopping himself round frantically.

               Zip! Back to the mansion. Zip! To Market Square. Zip! And there was the castle yet again. He was getting the hang of it. Zip! Here was Midgard—but how did you stop? Zip!

               “Oh, _confound_ it!” Thor cried, almost in the marshes again. This time he hopped round very carefully and trod with great deliberation. Zip! And fortunately the boot landed in a cowpat and he sat down with a thump. Peter sprinted up before Thor could move and dragged the boot off his foot. “Thank you!” Thor cried breathlessly. “There seemed no reason why I should ever stop!”

               Thor’s heart pounded a bit as they walked across the common to Pepper Potts’ house, but only in the way hearts do when you have done a lot rather quickly. He felt very grateful for whatever Banner and Hulk had done.

               “Nice place,” Peter remarked as he hid the boots in Ms. Potts’ hedge.

               Thor agreed. The house was the biggest in the village. It had white walls in between marble columns and extravagant gardens. It was very elegant. The house of someone quite rich.

               Pepper Potts answered the door herself. She wore a crisp suit, yet still had a warm and welcoming demeanor. Swathes of red hair coiled around her head. Ms. Potts looked from Thor to Peter. “Good morning to you,” she said politely.

               Thor sighed. Peter said, “This is Loki Odinson’s great-uncle. I brought him here to see Loki.”

               “I must admit, that I don’t really see the resemblance, Mr. Odinson,” Pepper Potts said, before smiling and opening the door wider. “But do come in. Loki is a bit busy just now, but have some scones and honey while you wait.”

               As she turned, a large collie dog squeezed past Ms. Potts’ legs, barged between Thor and Peter, and ran across the nearest flower bed, snapping off flowers right and left.

               “Oh, stop him!” Pepper demanded, flying off in pursuit. “I don’t want him out just now!”

               There was a minute or so of helter-skelter chase, in which the dog ran hither and thither, whining in a disturbed way, and Pepper and Thor ran after the dog, jumping flower beds and getting in one another’s way, and Peter ran after Thor crying, “Stop! You’ll make yourself ill!” Then the dog set off loping round one corner of the house. Peter realized that the way to stop Thor was to stop the dog. He made a crosswise dash through the flower beds, plunged round the house after the dog, and seized it by two handfuls of its thick coat just as it reached the orchard at the back.

               Thor hobbled up to find Peter pulling the dog away backward and making such strange faces at him that he thought at first he was ill. But he jerked his head so often toward the orchard that he realized he was only trying to tell him something. He stuck his face around the corner of the house, expecting to see a swarm of bees, or something.

               Banner was there with Loki. They were sitting outside, each on one side of a plain wooden table. Loki lounged in a lawn chair, looking decidedly bored with the situation, while Banner looked over a staff with a sort of ardent fascination. However, Loki did not look like Hela at all. He was his own elegant albeit oily self. He rested his chin on a knuckled fist and looked to be dozing off.

               Thor brought his head back round the corner and looked with dismay at Peter holding the whining collie dog. “He must have had a speed spell with him,” Peter whispered, equally dismayed.

               Pepper Potts caught them up, panting and trying to pin back a loose coil of strawberry-blonde hair. “Bad dog!” she said in a fierce whisper to the collie. “I’ll hire someone to put a spell on you if you do that once more!” The dog blinked and crouched down. Pepper pointed a stern finger. “Into the house! Stay in the house!” The collie shook himself free of Peter’s hands and slunk away round the house again. “Thank you so much,” Pepper said to Peter as they all followed it. “He _will_ keep trying to bite Loki’s visitor. _Inside!_ ” she shouted sternly in the front garden, as the collie seemed to be thinking of going around the house and getting to the orchard the other way. The dog gave her a woeful look over its shoulder and crawled dismally indoors through the porch.

               “That dog may have the right idea,” Thor said. “Mrs. Potts, do you know who Loki’s visitor is?”

               Pepper chuckled. “The Wizard Banner, or Doctor Banner, or whatever he calls himself,” she said. “But Loki and I don’t let on we know. It amused me when he first turned up, calling himself David Bannister, because I could see he’d forgotten me, though I hadn’t forgotten him, even though his hair used to be shorter in his student days,” Pepper by now had her hands folded in front of her and was standing bolt upright, prepared to talk all day, as Thor had often seen her do before. “He studied with an old friend of mine—Hank Pym, have you heard of him?—right before his wife died and he retired. When I used to work for Tony Stark, he used to transport us both to Wakanda to see a show from time to time. And he always wanted to drop in on Hank Pym while I was there. He likes his old colleagues to keep in touch. And one time he introduced this Wizard Banner to us. Oh, he liked him. Pym worked with Tony Stark too, you know, and he said that Banner was twice as good—”

               “But don’t you know the reputation Banner has?” Peter interrupted.

               Getting into Pepper Pott’s conversation was rather like getting into a turning skipping rope. You had to those the exact moment, but once you were in, you were in. Pepper turned herself slightly to face Peter.

               “Most of it’s just talk, to my mind,” she said. Peter opened his mouth to say that it was not, but he was in the skipping rope and it went on turning. “And he came in one day asking to see the magical artefact that had taken a liking to Loki—that staff—and I said to Loki, ‘Here’s your big chance.’ I knew Banner could give him more connections in the magic community—I never could get the hang of magic, you know. Loki is a good apprentice, if a bit weird, and I’m fond of him. If Hank Pym was still teaching, I’d introduce the two immediately. But he isn’t. So I said, ‘Loki, here’s Wizard Banner asking for your help and you could do worse than acquire some more powerful contacts. I don’t think Loki was too keen on the idea at first, but he’s been dealing with it, and they seem to get on fine.”

               Here Peter, who kept looking nervously to the corner of the house in case Banner came around it and discovered them, managed to trample through the skipping rope and stop it by saying, “I think we’d better be going.”

               “Are you sure you won’t come in and have some tea? It’s very good, even Tony liked it, and he hates tea.” And she was off again, though somehow she segued into how busy owning Stark’s old business is while also taking on apprentices. Peter and Thor walked purposefully down the path to the gate and Pepper drifted behind them, talking away and sorrowfully straightening plants that the dog had bent as she talked. Thor meanwhile racked his brains for a way to find out how Pepper knew Loki was Loki. Pepper paused to gasp a bit as she heaved a large lupine upright.

               Thor took the plunge. “Mrs. Potts, wasn’t it my niece Hela who was supposed to come to you?”

               “Naughty kids!” Pepper said, smiling and shaking her head as she emerged from the lupine. “As if I wouldn’t recognize a simple spell! But as I said to Loki at the time, ‘I’m not one to keep anyone against their will and I’d always rather teach someone who wants to learn. Only’, I said to him, ‘I’ll have no pretense here. You stay as your own self or not at all.’ And it’s worked out very happily, as you see. Are you sure you won’t stay and ask him for yourself?”

               “I think we’d better go,” Thor said.

               “We have to get back,” Peter added, with another nervous look toward the back. He collected the seven-league boots from the hedge and set one down outside the gate for Thor. “And I’m going to hold on to you this time,” he said.

               Pepper Potts leaned over her gate while Thor inserted his foot in the boot. “Seven-leaguers,” she said. “Would you believe, I’ve not seen any of those for years. Very useful things for someone your age, Mr. Er—I wouldn’t mind a pair myself these days. So it’s you Hela inherited her witchcraft from, is it? Not that it necessarily runs in families, but as often as not—”

               Peter took hold of Peter’s arm and pulled. Both boots came down and the rest of Pepper Pott’s talk vanished in the Zip! and rush of air. Next moment Peter had to brace his feet in order not to collide with the castle. The door was open. Inside, Hulk was roaring, “Porthaven door! Someone been banging on it since Peter and Thor leave!”

**Author's Note:**

> i did basically take this word for word from the book because im lazy and uncreative, etc. just for the exposition though dw
> 
> (i DO NOT own or take credit for howl's moving castle.)
> 
> follow me on tumblr!


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